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Chatting to smart people at conferences, and in meetings, got Ben and I thinking about doing an interview show that would allow us to take some time to learn from luminaries in our industry.

We have many shows that talk about technical issues, but what about getting to know the people a little more, what makes them tick, and what brought them to this point?

There is an interviewer named Michael Parkinson who is the best in the business. In the US when Brad Pitt comes on Leno, you learn that he has a new movie, and Leno cracks some jokes.

In the UK when Brad Pitt comes on Parky, you actually get to know the guy, and some fun stories. Parky lets the interviewer talk. He makes them at home and they actually talk to you.

This is what I want to see come out of Tech Luminaries. There are a lot of interesting characters in tech, so let’s listen to their stories.

First up is Brendan Eich. We did this interview back in 2007 before we had any idea that we would be joining Mozilla, which gives the interview an interesting lens.

Brendan is incredibly sharp and is a fun guy to let ramble on about many topics. We have a couple more old ones in the can, and will start doing some new ones, including in video form.

Download the MP3 directly, and you can subscribe via iTunes.

Who would you like to see interviewed?

Valleywag writes about how she “married down”.

Why is that? They claim that he “buys and manages apartments for rich people, a business he somewhat brazenly dubs “private equity.” His business is called “Montara Capital Partners,” which makes him sound like a venture capitalist. He is also a lawyer, sort of, which is definitely several rungs down Silicon Valley’s social ladder.”

Doesn’t that sound so terrible? Mothers are known not to be proud of a child becoming a lawyer :/

This is so obviously sexist. If you turn it around, have you even seen the press talking about how Businessman X has married down because his fiance isn’t as successful as him. No. We never see that. No one expects that a mate do the same thing, or match themselves in the amount of money they make.

It is hard enough to find someone to spend your life with. If Marissa found someone flipping burgers at McDonalds, and they loved each other, congrats. Let along this chap who seems pretty successful to me too.

All this being said, you have to say that he has done quite well. Attractive, rich, powerful. Good luck to them!

And, it is much nicer to read these kind of articles on Marissa.

Facebook Uploads

Sorry, we cannot support uploads sent via email. Upload photos from your iPhone with our free application, Facebook for iPhone:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284882215&mt=8

This is the message that I now get when I try to use the Facebook feature of emailing photos to my account. For a long time, I have emailed an alias on my domain which forwards on to both Flickr and Facebook, get to get photo into both places at once.

My blog brings in these photos from Facebook using Fotobook. Now I can longer use this workflow. Instead, Facebook wants me to stop using the “open” import mechanism of SMTP, and instead wants to force me into the mobile walled garden of the Facebook app on the iPhone. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Facebook iPhone app is fantastically produced by Joe Hewitt, and I have no beef with it at all. I just don’t like being forced into one workflow which will then only work with that one provider. Facebook, by taking away a feature, changed the entire game.

Open protocols give us the ability to develop our own patterns, and tweak the implementation over time. When blogger (and others) allowed us to abstract the implementation behind DNS records, it felt better (as well as being able to export the data out).

Facebook Connect

There are advantages to the walled garden though. I have been really worried about seeing Facebook Connect buttons shown up around the Web. The UX for FB Connect is very nice indeed, which is why I was so worried. The majority of people won’t choose the Open platform purely because “they should”. Open needs to compete on its own rite.

This is why I was so pleased to see Open Connect:

We need to do this quickly, as people will only put “one” of these on, and it should be the open meta platform.

I think that there is a place for the browser to help out here too, as I have mentioned before. If you login to the browser once, and we agree on the protocols, the browser can do the handshake for us. A great UI….. none at all.

Time to “make the Web better” instead of how Facebook tries to “make a better Web”.

Greasemonkey and Fluid userscripts. AIR and the new Titanium apps. Browser add-ons. When you go to a website do you know if you are getting the best experience for you? You could search for script on userscripts, or Google for apps, but what if the developers of the sites had a way of pointing out that there were enhanced experiences for you?

This is where App Discover comes in. It is a Firefox add-on that notifies you of these very items. All the developer has to do is add a simple link tag to their page, and the add-on will find it for you.

For example, if Twitter added the following tag, you would be notified of TweetDeck:

<link rel="application" 
  type="application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip" 
  title="TweetDeck Adobe AIR Twitter App" 
  href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/TweetDeck_0_20.air" />

That line would mean you would see this in the browser:

The type is a mime-type of course, and these are mapped into custom verbiage, but if you come up with something new… as long as the href is good, you should be golden.

I just added support for Appcelerator Titanium for example:

<link rel="application" 
  type="application/vnd.appcelerator-titanium-app-package+zip" 
  title="Tweetanium Appcelerator Titanium Twitter App" 
  href="http://tweetanium.com/tweetanium.zip" />

This is just a simple beginning of course. Where would we really want to go from here?

• The current limitation is that it only really works well with one link tag (items get replaced)
• I want to add preferences so the user can let the add-on know what they want to be alerted about (e.g. yes to Titanium apps and Greasemonkey scripts only!)
• Be smart based on installation: E.g. if you don’t have Fluid (and especially if not on a Mac), don’t show it
• Get social: “You have three friends who have installed TweetDeck”. This requires the browser being smarter about your social graph, which I think is a natural progression.
• It should be smarter and not bug you when you go back to the same page. That can be fixed via the AnnotationService.

That leads me to XUL. I tweeted how it can feel a little strange to look up XUL docs and see dates in the lower 2000s. You have this nagging feeling of “has something really not changed since them? Is there an new better way of doing this?” As @mfinkle pointed out, “XUL is stable.”

I have to say thanks to the Ubiquity team who had done the lifting for me, which meant that this add-on took an hour to write!

Sorry, you must have a Windows PC and Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater to play this game

Excuse me? This is exactly why I joined Mozilla with Ben. I don’t want to access my bank in 2010 and see “You must be running Silverlight on Windows with IE 9″. It sounds crazy, but think back a few years and we were there. And, this message from a Dora the Explorer game reminded me that we still even have that problem today!

This brings me to online games. There are so many (mainly Flash) games for kids online. It is fantastic. I play PBS Kids games such as Curious George with Sam for hours.

The problem I run into is that because they are simple little games, they don’t have the notion of saving a game, or going to a level. I can see why the creators wouldn’t put this in. It is more work, and they probably think “these are quick little games, who needs that?”

The problem is that kids tend to get addicted to a game and want to play it again and again and again. Sam will want to go back to play, and it is so annoying to play the same first level once again! Let me skip!

And then there is losing the game. Kids get so attached, that I dread the following interaction (which has happened):

• Daddy, let’s play the Curious George game with the boats
• Ok, *opens it up on the computer*
• Um, it looks like that game isn’t there, let’s try the new one
• NOOOOO I WANT THE BOATS

Kids really care, so game sites, please add rather than deleting if you can. There is a kid out there that loves the game, and you break his heart when you nuke it. The good news is that 5 minutes later he is onto the next thing…. but still.

Any other parents run into this? Any favourite games?

A few years back Web developers were celebrating the glimpse of a beautiful Winter as some of our best hacked our way out of the prehistoric ages to give us Ajax.

Fast forward to Hope year and we have seen the Web platform explode. We have gone from Web hack to the mobile phone and even the desktop.

With technology such as Prism, Fluid, Gears, and AIR we get to use our Web skills to build desktop applications. If you play the numbers game and realise how many people understand how to hack on the Web versus write native applications you can see how if harnessed correctly, the Web could be a dominant platform far beyond the browser as we know it.

However, how do we break out of the Web sandbox? We gain a great deal of this “secure” (don’t say that to Crockford) place for us to build applications and we can’t just break out willy-nilly.

The problem is, that if we don’t come up with something you will always end up saying “I can’t prompt my users for every little thing, so I guess I will just write a native application.”

This of course doesn’t actually help make life secure for the end users. Instead, they hit OK on the “Sure, I know I downloaded that from the Internet” dialog and now native code is doing whatever it wants too!

ASIDE: I would love to know how many people: a) download something from the Web, b) run it, c) see that dialog and then d) say “oh, OK no.” I know what I am willing to bet on ;)

What if we took the weakness of the current Web sandbox and make it a strength. If our platform is able to intercept what is going on, imagine if we could have metrics that show us exactly what an application is doing. Chrome does one small thing here, showing you the memory that a tab is using. This is a great start. What if we go further and you think of iStatMenu being somewhere in the browser:

Now for every browser application you can see not only its memory footprint, but you can see if it is using your location, how it uses the network, the local database, and even the file system. Instead of asking once “is it ok for this app to do anything” we can ask a more nuanced question, but also give a lot of feedback after the fact, way after you have forgotten what you said would be OK.

We could also have power user modes that allow you to visually see the heap, allowing you to navigate it as you debug your application. Detailed networking views. And, more.

Of course, the best way of doing this work is through implicit interfaces. Having a Google Search with a “[x] near my location” checkbox is the obvious example.

This is a delicate issue, but I believe that the Web needs to move in a broad direction, and we need to work through these problems. What do you think?

Peteris Krumin has another My Job Interview at Google post which is always a sure fire way to drive traffic to your site. People seem to really want to hear about Google interviews for some reason!

Google is a great, big company (the comma is important) and had an amazingly short list of foibles that really irked me during my tenure, and a huge laundry list of items that made me excited to get to work. That being said, I once changed my internal IM status to “Recruiting needs a Code Yellow” instead of latency.

The hiring process drove me batty, and to some extent so did the performance review process too.

So, As I read Peteris’ diary of his interview process I wondered if it would be time for large companies to have an Internal Affairs group to test their assumptions.

They could have current employees be interviewed again by groups that don’t know each other (this is when it matters if you are big). You could have Bob “I’ve been at the company for five years” Hunter come in to interview for a “new job” and see how it pans out. I am guessing that it would be quite enlightening from both sides. I wonder how many people wouldn’t quite make it in, so to say. I am pretty sure that although my one path to Google worked out, there were many folks in the road where I could have had a slightly different interview panel or hiring committee and I wouldn’t have made it (I won’t argue who would have been right ;).

InternalAffairsRecruiting.com could send trained people into interviews to do reports on the companies too. A lot of fun would be had by all. And, maybe some hazing would end?

On another Google recruiting note, the process worked well and Alex Russell is joining the Chrome team. Congrats to both Google and Alex on the move. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with there. Having an Ajax fellow working inside a browser team can only be a good thing for us developers. And, with Aaron, Arv, Dan, and many others… Google has top notch talent. It also means a Dojo fellow joins the existing crew of Brad, Gavin, Abe, and I am sure others.

And then I see Google Layoffs – 10,000 Workers Affected which has already been read into far more than it should be. I actually think it can be good for Google to focus a little and rein in. Instead of layoffs I am sure we will see a bit of a thinning due to attrition and not hiring quite as fast. Laying off the bottom performers isn’t a bad thing though!

This is a fantastic time to hire top talent. Just look. Google got Alex, and probably let go of a few fringe folks (no offense to them) that aren’t engineers. I am excited to start a new group at Mozilla with a great pool of people talking to us. Remember Apple was built in the 70s ;)

Being a power user sucks, as you are often in the minority. The marketing folks are drooling over the middle of that bell curve, and you are clustered at one end with a few of your mates.

I got reminded of this again with the iPhone 2.2 update that gave me this:

I get it, some people didn’t know that the search icon would do what that huge block on the right hand side now does. Make it like the “normal” browser and maybe they will get it. For me though, the space that they gained with the reload/stop URL bar integration is destroyed by the huge search box which does nothing for me.

If you could change it back, that would be OK. about:config away. But Apple doesn’t do this for us. We live in a Jobsian society where his vision is our vision. One more gripe with the iPhone even with this update…. I keep expecting the team to give us a decent friggin cache. PLEASE let me give the iPhone as much space as it needs to keep my stuff around! A mobile browser that is often on a crap network needs this more than anyone else! Cache more aggressively. Save my JavaScript and CSS! At the very least, don’t let me hit the back button and wait for the entire bugger to be grabbed again for the love of god! Why can’t I about:config and up the caching space and rules :(

I find this common with the Apple tools in general. They often get away with it as the engineers hide things in Apple prefs that we can change. The UNIX sometimes gets a chance to shine through for us there. Developers can sneak in a few more settings that don’t show up in the UI that Mr. J probably looks at with a fine tooth comb.

Argh. So close. Does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it is time to check out Linux? Nah, I am not that crazy ;)

With Adobe MAX kicking off today, on the back of PDC, we get side by side comparisons.

We have heard talk of the new positioning of the Flash platform for Flash, AIR, and Flex. These have always been in the platform business unit, so nothing is really new there.

Adobe (via Macromedia) has traditionally been a Web designer company, but developers haven’t jumped in to the same degree (note: not to say they haven’t been wildly successful!). I think that the perception is something like this:

With Silverlight making a huge charge I worry about a world where you have “Best viewed in Silverlight and IE” (which in fact is “only viewed in…”) and people often ask: “But isn’t Flash just as bad?”

Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight :)

The conversation tends to end up with opensourcing Flash, which I think will happen at some point through necessity, and the sooner the better (for everyones sake). Flex has a loyal base and has some open source help, but hasn’t gotten the love that it could get because it sits on top of something that isn’t open source itself. It is hard to get excited about an open source tech that sits on top of the same vendors proprietary platform!

There is much more that Adobe can do other than open sourcing Flash though. There is a chance to offer tools to help the Open Web. What if Flex could render to the HTML platform?

I hope to see a glimmer of this vision in the keynote and more at MAX. I have a huge respect for everyone I have worked with at Adobe, and I hope that the Open camp wins through, although it will take time.

I really hope that the real Flash Catalyst will be helping the Open Web developers too :)

Curtis Bartley fixed a Firefox bug which has now enabled live links within view source. As you can see above, links are now underlined and you can navigate away through the source. Very nice indeed, thanks Curtis!

Ben and I were talking about this, as well as bringing other features into the world of view source. Some small things such as popping up the actual color when you see a #xxxxxx, or a thumbnail on an img or url().

Of course, this normally leads to Firebug-land. In fact, after talking to some Mozillans, I am excited about improving discoverability.

For example, would it be cool to:

a) Show a top info drop down saying “You seem to be interested in the underpinnings of the Web and development. If so, __check out Firebug__” when a user runs their third View Source. Ditto for other develop-y actions (grabbing the Web Developer toolbar etc).

b) Allowing sites to link to their add-ons. This one should be cross browser. If you are a company such as LinkedIn, and you have developed a cool add-on or extension for your site, how are users to know? They may no be hanging on on AMO looking for one :)

You can imagine something like:

<link rel='browser-addon' browser='firefox' href='https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1512' type='application/addon' />

to point to a Firefox add-on in this case. You could also follow the same pattern to get info on site specific browser info, Greasemonkey scripts, or specific apps (e.g. AIR apps).

<link rel='browser-userscript' title='Cool Video Script' href='http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9789' />
 
<link rel='browser-app' title='eBay Air' href='http://desktop.ebay.com/' />

What do you think?