Tag: Internet

I’ve managed to avoid using feed readers for years, but reading wordpress-maven Matt’s post today about switching to Google Reader from Bloglines suddenly made me realize just how much time I waste in the mechanics of web surfing. I just spent the better part of two hours populating Reader with my links and I am already blown away at how much more efficient this is going to be. I literally will be able to do twice as much surfing in half the time. Most of the time saving productivity increase comes from the unified interface; everything is in one place and I can rapidly scan headlines to see what i really want to read. Most blogs helpfully put the whole post into the feed, as well – as do comics like XKCD. And the interface is the same as Gmail, including the ability to “tag” a link with multiple categories and the dynamic interface which means no lag. This is like a revolution. A revelation. Both.

I’m not pleased about investing further into Google. I don’t like all my eggs in one basket, but at least it’s trivial to export my OPML file if I decide to jump ship. In the interim, though, this is incredible.

And whats even cooler is that I am going to setup RSS feeds for searches on PubMed – so I’ll be able to stay up to date on my work as well as my play. Maybe this is the kick in the pants that I needed to get Reference Scan going again…

I think that ten years from now, when we look back and wonder where the extinction of the desktop computer and operating system combo began, this news will be identified as one of the seeds:

Javascript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has revealed a new project called IronMonkey that will eventually make it possible for web developers to use IronPython and IronRuby alongside Javascript for interactive web scripting.

The IronMonkey project aims to add multilanguage functionality to Tamarin, a high-performance ECMAScript 4 virtual machine which is being developed in collaboration with Adobe and is intended for inclusion in future versions of Firefox. The IronMonkey project will leverage the source code of Microsoft’s open source .NET implementations of Python and Ruby, but will not require a .NET runtime. The goal is to map IronPython and IronRuby directly to Tamarin using bytecode translation.

A plugin for IE will also be developed. The upshot of this is that Python and Ruby programming will become available to web applications run through the browser, on the client side. Look at how much amazing functionality we already enjoy in our web browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technology, which is AJAX-driven (ie, javascript). Could anyone back in 1996 imagine Google Maps? Hard-core programming geeks who understand this stuff better than I do should check out Jim Hugunin’s blog at Microsoft about what they have in mind; it’s heady stuff. But fundamentally what we are looking at is a future where apps are served to you just like data is, and your web browser becomes the operating system in which they run. I can’t even speculate about what this liberation from the deskbound OS model will mean, but it’s not a minor change.

I was a Eudora user in college and then switched over to Thunderbird in grad school. How times have changed! Ars has the details – the Mozilla Foundation is spinning off Thunderbird to an independent organization. It’s a good move since Thunderbird was always kind of an odd man at Mozilla; the old POP3 model seems so outdated now in this modern era of web-based mail. I exclusively use Yahoo and Gmail for 99% of my own email now, and there’s always Outlook/Exchange (or Notes) on the business front. Then there’s the internal messaging systems of Facebook and LinkedIn, and of course chat (fully integrated to gmail and yahoo). Finally there’s text messaging to round off things, and there are increasing bridges being built between these various platforms (such as twitter, or send email to [phone number]@ messaging.sprint.com/verizon.com etc). Staid old POP just seems like a dinosaur in comparison, and from my experience the POP systems are the ones that are the most vulnerable to spam and virus threats.

Ultimately the desired end goal would be to drop email entirely and communicate entirely via messaging within closed systems. Thats a pretty controversial opinion Iguess, given that the trend has been precisely the opposite until now – remember the day when Prodigy email was finally compatible with Compuserve? how we cheered.. fully unaware of our spam overlord masters waiting in the wings.

But I think messaging systems and social networking sites are better for communication because you have a more trusted “network” and you can vet people before they ever are allowed to contact you. 99% of my email is from people I already know, and the remaining 1% can be referred to a web page or blog or something instead.

Ultimately the freewheeling nature of the web means that Identity becomes a form of currency; email was always identity agnostic and completely egalitarian, with no thought given to vetting or social networks. And that was a loophole that the spammers were destined to drive trucks through.

Mozilla is better off without the Thunderbird baggage; whether Thunderbird succeeds as an independent product will depend on whether they stay rooted in the old POP email model or whether they try to innovate around it and embrace some of the new forms of communication out there. There’s a niche waiting to be filled.

UPDATE: the Thunderbird team makes an appeal for developers to join them.

Josh analyzes the relative merits of Twitter vs newcomer Pownce, and finds Pownce wanting. Pownce is essentially an online chat application, which has essentially one unique feature:

instead of being boxed into 1:1 communication (IM) or X:X (chat) or 1:X (Twitter), Pownce offers all of it in one package. Want to send a picture to your family, but not all your friends? Easy: select recepients and send away. Try to do the same thing in any IM client and you’ll see that it usually doesn’t work and/or takes quite a few steps.

However, as Josh points out, Pownce lacks the public API which makes sites like twitterfeed possible, vastly increasing the utility of Twitter. Frankly, 140 chars of plaintext is enough; I still rue the day that email became html-enabled.

It’s sad but true that the vast majority of Twitterers employ the service for banal ends. However, there’s a lot more you can do. Josh uses it to tie together all his output, from Flickr to blogs. I use it as a roadtrip real-time journal (though twittering while driving/TWD has earned me some deserved reprimands). I also just added the feeds from the “stranger than fiction” and the “marshfield” categories here at Haibane.info to my twitter, to liven it up without flooding it too much. The key is not to overdo it.

The best thing about Twitter is that it’s input is device-agnostic; you can twitter from pretty much anywhere. Until global wifi becomes a reality (ie, never) or EVDO becomes affordable (ie, someday), you simply can’t expect access to the Internet from anywhere, even in the continental US. And more to the point, you aren’t limited to consuming content; you can also create content from anywhere.

Is Twitter perfect? obviously not. A simple feature request would be the ability to send pictures as well as text. That would increase the utility of twitter by another order of magnitude. But as it is, it’s still a novel service with genuine potential for creativity.

Incidentally, if anyone wants a Pownce invite, I’ve got 6 to hand out. Leave a comment with your email address.

I’m going to have to look very carefully at this:

Grazr is a free publishing tool for feeds. It lets you quickly and easily display RSS, RDF, Atom, and OPML files on any Web page so they can be viewed by any visitor to the site.

This kind of blows away the old RSS-to-Javascript service. And with the OPML support.. this could really be useful.

Netscape has released a new version of Navigator. Netscape! And Apple has ported Safari to Windows. Its notable that for both, the main selling points of differentiation from IE and Firefox are new ways of messing around with tabs. I find this obsession with tabs on the part of these bit players to be a kind of cargo cult mentality; wave the word “tabs” around and the users will fall out of the skies.

The real innovation on the browser front is porting the web to handheld devices. In that regard, Opera is the king – they just released a version for the wifi-capable Nintendo DS. Opera really understands that the user interface needs to be custom to the device; anyone who has used the Opera browser on the Wii can attest to how well they’ve leveraged the strengths of the unique interface there. With the DS, they have two screens, and a stylus to play with. That is definitely going to be interesting; the DS is a fraction of the cost of bulkier “web access devices” like the UMPC or Origami, and there’s already a gigantic user base.