techno.blog("Dion")

Congrats to Microsoft on getting Jon Udell on the books:

“My official title will be Evangelist, and I’ll report to Jeff Sandquist. He’s the leader of the team that creates Channel 9 and Channel 10, websites that feature blogs, videos, screencasts, and podcasts for Microsoft-oriented developers.”

A very smart move for them. Jon is great at what he does, and is exactly the type they need. He tells it as it is, really gets into things before making his mind up, and is trustworthy.

Kudos to Jon on the new job.

… and the company needed to come up with titles for a new group …

• Person A: I don’t like the term ‘developer’.
• Person B: I don’t like the term ‘engineer’. I solve business problems, not work on scientific planning
• Person C: I don’t like the term ‘programmer’. I am more than just someone who writes code.
• Person D: I hate the term ‘consultant’.
• Person E: ‘architect’ is so fluffy. I do want to write code

When noone agreed the title became:

Middleware Maven

A title that no one would ever want :)

“maven: an expert or connoisseur.”

(based on a true story)

The new phone capable device from Apple that is coming out first sounds like it may not be for me like I first thought:

“We believe that the music phone will be true to these statements and should be considered a music player that has phone capabilities rather than a phone with a built-in music player.”

I don’t care about the music side of things. Sure, it will be nice to not have an iPod and a phone. Convergence is good, but I am more interested in the OS X tie ins, which looks like I may be more interested in the iPhone 2.0 which is already being worked on.

I want a great phone, with a killer interface (that is fast like a blackberry, but better looking), small size-ish, qwerty available, and syncs totally seemlessly with my Mac.

You know something is wrong when the good solution looks like:

TypeReference<List<Integer>>() {}

See:

• Super Type Tokens: Bob Lee
• Super Type Tokens: Neal Gafter
• Java Generics Issue for Ted Neward

I dabble in Spanish and French (read: I took them in school, awhile back), but let’s face it, I need content in English for it to mean much to me, and I sure as hell have no clue with non-latin alphabets.

I like other cultures, but I have xenophobia on the web.

I want an english filter. I really need it on:

• Email Filter: Mr. spam filter, if it isn’t in english, it probably aint for me. I am getting tons of asian language spam at the moment, and it drives me nuts when it gets through a spam filter
• RSS Filter: Google Blog search has an option for english. Technorati let’s you tell it if your blog is in english. I want searches on technorati and friends to automatically filter out the non-english.

This matters even more for me as I often have searches running for some form of ‘Ajax’. Most of that feed results have to do with the dutch soccer team. If dutch was ignored, most of the content would instantly disappear. It doesn’t solve the semantic web, and people speaking about the team Ajax in english would get through (but that is another problem).

How would you decide if a message is in English? X% of the words have to match a dictionary of some sort? :)

I have a couple of posts recently, and in the past, that talk about the topics of services, and open data.

It is interesting to think about the platform of the internet age, compared to the platform of the Microsoft Windows age (not that it is dead, but it is changing).

Who would think of building a better spreadsheet program for Windows? Excel and office are king there. Now, we have Office 2.0 conferences and there are more Ajax-y office products than I have had hot dinners.

The “small guy” seems to have more of a chance in this word. The advantages are:

• Expectation: When google comes out with a product everyone is ready to pounce on it. If it isn’t a Google Maps-like revolution it is ‘eh’.
• Scalability: When you talk to Google engineers you hear about the scalable platform that they have built (which they have too). To get code in production it has to go through a lot of tests and code reviews. Python scripts will shout loudly at you unless you do it right.
• Tools: Google isn’t using Ruby on Rails to whip out an appr.com quickly and put it out there for people to play with. The little guy can move a lot more quickly to adjust. You can think a lot more short-term

How about open data. The more open we get with data, the free-er the market becomes. If everyone is integrating open data, then you can build one piece of the office picture, and have it work just great with the rest of Google office. Plug’n play. 30 boxes does a very good job at this right now.

Gmail doesn’t even play with vCard. Ouch.

We aren’t there yet with open data services. I actually wish that Google had that all done. One place to hold that open data that you can import and export and tweak in any and every way. You know, gdata. Then we can all build on top of these services. Google would then be competing with other products on the same services, but they would have the inner advantage.

The winning combination is: open open data + best user experience.

In this new world, competitors will be coming from all directions. It isn’t as easy as Windows, where they won and shut up shop for a decade.

Or is it? Is all of this crap, and the reality is that life is the same as always. Win first, kill the competition, get the users in quick, lock them in somehow, and throw away the key.

I hope not.

NOTE: Google is used as the company of choice. There are others in the game, I know :)

Ben and I had a good laugh at the ability to change peoples GNames, and I love how Ben chose “ILovePresidentBush” as the worst thing you could change some ones name too.

I don’t know if I could think of much worse ;)

Steve is right: The Imminent Demise of the Page View.

We have been talking about this for a long time. Even before Ajax made people realise “wait a minute, my entire app is one page view even if they click all over”.

You have always been able to trick page views.

Obvious techniques such as:

• meta refresh your page!
• Take ajaxian.com. We could show the summary only and force people to click on the title to see the entire article. This would have a big effect on page views, but wouldn’t mean that it is the right thing to do for users

• You can change your site flow to dramatically effect page views. Duh.

  I have already seen clients care less and less about this metric, and talk about other items. If they are sponsors or advertisers, the proof is quickly in the pudding. They will see the impressions, and more importantly click to action numbers after being on the site, in short order.