Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect, says, “The web is now social, and the social web is now open,” and I of course agree.
In fact, I think a case can be made that the Internet, from its first RFCs, was built on a process and with a philosophy that was already social and open from day one.
Check out all the useful examples in Joseph’s talk (from Google I/O):
Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.
A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.
The conference describes itself as
for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.
If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.
They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network - oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.
For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:
Once installed, most widgets are ignored.
Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.
(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)
Not really sure how to respond to this.
Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.
Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons
Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.
I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.
I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.
I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.
I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.
It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.
(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)
I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.
Most of the time when I post a tweet using Twitterific (which I mostly love), I get this strange window popping up:
Why does Twitterific want to talk to Skype anyway? Bueller?
Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:
(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)
And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:
These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides.
I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich.
Update: Here are Ted’s slides:
Via the IxDA list I noticed this item on the Jensen Harris’ An Office User Interface Blog explaining how application developers can license and implement the new Microsoft Office 2007 interface, “including the Ribbon, galleries, [and] the Mini Toolbar.”
Here are more details on the licensing process and the place where you actually go to download a license.
There is one fairly reasonable exception:
There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license.
Engadget posted a video showing a complete interface walkthrough for Zune, demonstrating its UI and wireless sharing feature (via Edwin Booth, who posted the link to the IxDA list, saying, “If you’ve used Windows Media Center, it’s very similar”).
Gmail works pretty well on mobile devices already, but Google just announced a Java client application for mobile (Official Google Blog: Gmail mobile client is live) that runs on hundreds of devices. I visited the download page on my phone and it automatically detected that I was connecting via an HTC 2125 and supplied me with the correct Java “midlet” for my device.
It seems to work great, once I turned off the itsy-bitsy text-size option, although I’m not sure I really need it, since - as I said - the regular Gmail website already adapts itself pretty well to my device. Cool wow factor, though.
According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.”
Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set, viewable by any browser; it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all your wireframes.” It’s suited for collaboration by teams of multiple IAs and it doesn’t require any special plugins to view the HTML prototype output.
Niewland suggests that the prototypes created by swipr are suitable for early usability testing, and that the documents print well from Visio.
At swipr.com you can download the software (still in beta), see examples, and contribute to a forum.
Thanks, Jacco!
Rich Internet Application (RIA) formats, such as Ajax, Flex, OpenLazslo, XAML, and so on, are all the rage on the Web these days, but sometimes the tradeoff involved in moving from a clunky-feeling page-at-a-time forms-driven web interface model to the more snappy thick-client feel of RIAs is a loss in accessibility (as well as issues like breaking the back button and, as we saw with frames back in the day, the difficulty of bookmarking specific states in the middle of an interaction).
Now it looks like the W3C is taking the bull by the horns: W3C Announces Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:
Dynamic Web Content Currently Excludes Many Users: Assistive technologies, including screen readers, speech dictation software, and on-screen keyboards help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. To accomplish this, these tools require information about the semantics of specific portions of a document in order to present those portions in an accessible form. For example, to provide reliable access to a form element, a tool must also be able to recognize the state of that element (for example, whether it is checked, disabled, focused, collapsed, or hidden). Web sites are increasingly delivering applications with capabilities comparable to locally-installed software. These rich Internet applications make heavy use of scripting, and developers often improvise hybrids of existing technologies, including AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, and SVG. These applications do not always provide the semantics needed to support these technologies. People with disabilities are therefore at risk of being left out of this new world of information.
Todd Warfel reports that the inevitable bakeoff inside the Adobe-Macromedia merger has resulted in the winding down of FreeHand (in favor of Illustrator) and GoLive (in favor of Dreamweaver).
(btw, I know this was in May - so I’m slow on the uptake - so sue me!)
From the oldie-but-goodie file, here’s Painless Functional Specifications from Joel on Software.
Bonus: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice.
I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the nerdiest of ubergeeks are willing to sling so many pocket devices from their belt clips.
The downside of convergence is that you can end up with a device that is optimized for no use case and is only adequate for all of them, but these problems are being solved. For example, there’s no way I would carry a PDA and a phone now. My HTC smartphone is great for both and even my dad uses a Palm Treo now.
It’s an interesting market to keep an eye on.
Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).
I was going to post a link to this press release Socialtext Releases First Commercial Open Source Wiki | Socialtext Enterprise Wiki, when Dan pointed me to this CNet round-up of business-wiki related news. Looks like the idea is getting some traction in the business world. (One of our clients just pre-launched a wiki in stealth mode so its end-users can share tips on using their products. We’ll link to it when the time is right.)
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Socialtext press release:
Socialtext also shared its Public Roadmap to help guide the developer community for the next three months. The roadmap includes a source code repository, Debian, Red Hat, SOAP and REST APIs, usability enhancements, and additional DBMS management beyond Postgres, starting with MySQL. The release at the end of this period, code-named Palladium, will mark the open availability of the first enterprise grade, corporate backed, Wiki to enthusiasts and commercial users alike.
Full disclosure: I’m friendly with a couple of the principals of SocialText.
