techno.blog("Dion")

It is fun to see the wheel turn around again. I remember when EJB containers were the cats meow, and now when I hear someone say “container” in a meeting it is a social one.

I am happy to see some innovation from the Orkut folks. I have often been frustrated when I have clicked through something and been asked to install an application when I just wanted to see something simple. It makes me so mad that I never say no!

With OpenSocial, it’s possible to create environments where applications can spread because they provide great user experiences. The metric for success would be not the number of installs an application receives, but user engagement and happiness. Environments that focus on more than viral growth cultivate healthy, organic growth and usage. This contributes to the long-term sustainability of social platforms for both users and developers.

To that end, you’ll notice there are a number of functions in the OpenSocial API starting with “request” (e.g. requestShareApp, requestSendMessage). These functions define an agreement between the applications developer and the host container that allows the container to optionally prompt the user for more input, or simply deny the request. While each container will be able to define its own policy, we encourage apps developers and containers to take advantage of these functions to create an “install-free” user experience.

This was my first SXSW. I have always wanted to check it out, and it has certainly been a very different conference. The best part about it is the fact that everyone in the valley seems to meet down in Austin, and they are ready for a good time.

The content itself is also very different. Having a conference which is all panels is a strange choice, as it is bloody hard to do a good panel. The first thing that you have to do is have confrontation. The panelists should realise that this is entertainment and almost make it a game. Be contrary. Argue. Just don’t take it personal. Sitting and listening to “I agree with you Bob. I also think you should….” is a touch painful.

The “browser wars” panel had some spirit. Brendan and Chris weren’t going at it like, but they were having some fun up there.

Something Chris said (on the Web Standards panel) resonated:

“Make this a good decision for Microsoft”

I want to support Chris, and the other proponents in the IE team that I do believe are trying to do the right thing. I think that it is our responsibility to pump them up when they do good things just as much as we have to hold their feet to the fire when they do the opposite.

We need to do our work so any skeptics internal at Microsoft see that this has been the right move, and that they should open up more. We need to help IE 8 team beat the Silverlight team. The Web needs to win.

We also need to continue to push for even more transparency. I want Microsoft to take the good will that they have gotten and build on it. Don’t go dark on us until another beta. Open up a digg style database that lets people vote on features that they want to see. There are missing features that, without conversation, don’t make sense. Why didn’t they rev the DOM events? Have some town hall meetings. Invite the community up to Redmond, but if you do this, you have to actually listen and work with us. If done right, IE 8 will become a fantastic browser with the support of the development world.

How about that for a quick turn around?

Talking with code is powerful. Miguel posted screenshots of Mono running on the iPhone whereas Sun talked about Java running on it.

I always feel like I would like a reason to get into Mono, but never find one.

I believe that 2008 and beyond will be huge for mashups and APIs. We are going to move beyond the world of “Look, I took some data and put it together with a Google Map and Calendar” and have full featured read/write in browser APIs thanks in part to the slew of cross domain friendly features that are coming from browsers, Gears, and developer hacks.

I have talked about the blog.gears example, that shows how you can use Blogger as a back-end for a blog system. It seems quite obvious to me that if you are building a Web application that isn’t the Next Blog Thing, why would you want to spend any time building a blog system to get that functionality in the product. You have a couple of choices beyond writing it yourself. You could grab an open source blogging engine (there are many great ones), you could use a service and have blog.* CNAME over, or if you want tight integration you could do what blog.gears does, and use a JavaScript API to access blogger as the store and have it hidden from the user.

I got to thinking, how will the fact that it is easier to integrate with sites through richer APIs affect M & A?

An example that got me thinking about this is Dopplr and TripIt. Dopplr is a phenomenal service that seems to nail usability and the art of doing one thing, and doing it really well. It is clean. It has subtle touches that I love (the personal colors in the header icon and favicon even).

Them came along TripIt. The killer feature that it has is the ability to email your itineraries that you got from online sites and airlines to the system, and it groks a bunch of the formats and can thus suck them in automatically. Once you hit Apple-F, you are done, and you see the new information appear in your TripIt iCal.

Compare this to Dopplr. For a long time you would manually input your travel information in some shape or form. At the London Future of Web Apps I met Matt Biddulph, who not only was a fantastic, nice, fun guy, who gave the best talk at the event, but also was able to flip a bit which enabled Dopplr to read one of my Google Calendars. This feature is now in the wild for all. That was a great improvement, as I could setup a “Travel” calendar that Dopplr reads from.

I still had to keep that calendar going through. When TripIt came out, I heard cries of Dopplr fans that they should buy TripIt, or merge, or just copy the functionality. That isn’t the way with 2008. Instead, Matt was able to integrate with TripIt in a very simple way.

TripIt produces an iCal calendar from it’s data, and you can simply tie Dopplr to that calendar… and ta da!

I have been in quite a few meetings recently where the topic of buy has changed to be integrate through APIs. This enables each piece to grow, and to have people work on one small thing and make it the best it can be.

Of course, there is a time and a place for buyouts and mergers, but I wonder if they will be a little less frequent now. Then the game changes to being the platform, and being able to monetise it (a.k.a. make money to feed your family!)

Fixing calendars

As an aside, I still find a lot of pain with calendar systems. The main problem that I have is that I want events to cross various calendars, but collapse them in my view. For example, if I am going on a trip, I want my wife to see it, as well as my work colleagues. I don’t want to have to duplicate the entry in multiple calendars and then see the same darn thing repeatedly.

Paul Krill reported that Sun has looked at the iPhone SDK and thinks that it can port Java to the iPhone. It will be placed up on AppStore as an application, so I wonder what the user experience will be for apps that actually run Java, especially for the first time on a phone that doesn’t have it installed.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Java on the phone, just like I want full RubyCocoa, PyCocoa, CocoaJS, and any other language that you fancy.

Background Processes

So, the iPhone doesn’t allow background processes:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.

This makes me worry about Java too. Startup has never been a good point of the JVM. If I flip to a Java app am I going to have to wait for the bugger to startup? Is there going to be a way to load one VM and keep it loaded (doesn’t seem like it).

It seems like this is just a guideline and not a firm issue:

I’m a programmer and I just tried it [using the iPhone SDK] and you can keep your app running in the background in the normal way ApolloIM and iFob do it. I.e. overriding applicationSuspend.

Even more worrying though is this part of the developer agreement:

3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

Although it has been suggested that this is to stop non AppStore code, it seems to go a lot further than that.

Open source and the iPhone

Also, Mark Pilgrim has written up thoughts on whether iPhone apps can be GPL:

Since all iPhone apps must be distributed through a third-party (Apple’s “App Store”), that would make Apple the “distributor.” Which would mean that Apple — acting as the distributor of GPL-licensed object code — must provide source code or a written offer to provide source code. It’s analogous to a Linux distribution — they distribute binaries of upstream GPL programs, so they need to host the source code as well.

Microsoft stopped IE and messenger. Roz got on stage for years promising a native Office, and then when it gets here it is disappointing.

I like some of the MS stack. Expression Studio, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET, all promising.

It could have been for good reason (e.g. Safari really was decent then…) but, what about the trust?

And, when I see people the Olympics and the Library of Congress even signing up for Silverlight content? Erg.

It is fantastic to see IE8 up the ante on concurrent connections from 2 to 6. I would love to know how they made the call for 6. It sounds reasonable. You don’t want too many else you could end up sucking down so much content at once it could freak out the browser (e.g. imagine a bunch of video on a high speed line).

This should mean, for some situations, that you may not need to deal with www1, www2 type hacks to split up your domains. Of course, sometimes you will still run into the limit and it will be required.

I do wish that Twitter would up their ante too. Maybe not by changing the 140 char limit itself, but maybe by supporting #hashtags so they don’t “take up the room” and instead get moved down below to the metadata layer etc.

I read through Wired on the plane. In fact, I use Wired as a barometer on how much I am traveling. If I go to the airport and there IS NOT a new Wired for me to pick up, I know I am traveling too much.

Anyway, I perused the article on 37signals which did a good job on not being a total love-fest. It is one of those articles where you take out of it what you thought before. If you think they are arrogant gits you will say “yup, arrogant gits”. If you think they are doing great things for the industry, you will continue to think that too.

It did make me think about how great we had things a couple of years back when Rails was red hot. There was that brief time where you tons of people were saying “Wow, I am going to choose Rails for my next application”. The alpha masses from Java, PHP, ASP, all checked it out.

Now though? They are moving on to check out other solutions. Many frameworks have copied some of the good things from Rails that make sense in their worlds. Now when I think about the next toy to play with, I have a large set of potential “cool looking” frameworks to try.

For such a brief time, life was easy.

First we saw the productive pair programmer and now we see how we are dealing with humans, and it depends on the connections.

I hate the fear ads, and seeing the Clinton one was sad to see. Showing pictures of kids etc… are you kidding me?

I know Hilary is scrapping for her life, but still. I really don’t understand the experience line too, since she has only been a Senator for a few years. How she comes up with 32 years baffles me.

Anyway, it all reminded me of the fear-monging around Rails scaling.