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Found 9 entries.
It seems it is still somewhat unofficial, but Google intend to allow you OAuth access to your data. Excellent news!
It also seems that Google are planning to open up all of it's Data APIs to be OAuth capable, starting with the Contacts API.
See this announcement in the OAuth group.
Well done Google. That's a great step forward. Now let's see it keep going that way.
Labels: google, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, oauth
Inserted: 2008-04-26 22:14 (2 years, 3 months ago)
...but at least it is honest about it, unlike Google.
This new initiative by Yahoo!, the \l{Yahoo! Open Strategy|http://ycorpblog.com/2008/04/24/developer-welcome-mat/} is much like Google's \l{App Engine|code.google.com/appengine/}. Except they are being honest about it, unlike Google.
Instead of saying that you now have cloud computing and you can run on our hardware, Yahoo! just blatently said "make apps for our latent social network". I think that's really what Google should have said at the launch of App Engine because as far as I can tell, that's all it is.
So looking at it on the social network level, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Google and now Yahoo! are all competing to be the largest social network. Amazing how everyone is base-lining at that (all due to Facebook's immense success).
I'm not a big fan about much of this though since it still doesn't help promote what I want.
Instead of competing social networks, I want collaborating social networks. As I've said before "data wants to be free" and in any of the sites mentioned above that is not the case. In fact, it just locks users in more to that platform. Also, it means you have to choose which site to write apps for, unless they already allow Open Social apps (Orkut does, but Orkut isn't that big a player).
Fair play to Yahoo! though since I think that this will be a great step for them. Still, I wonder what their next strategy is. First it was a web directory, then a search engine, then a web portal and now a social network. They seem to transform into whatever the current flavour of the month is. What's next? Anything but a Microsoft subsidiary!
P.S. And no, I'm not a Google basher, I just like commenting on where I see they're doing it wrong. You can't be mad at a company that is putting $6.5 million into open source this year. And no, I'm not a Yahoo! lover either, I left them a long time ago due to all the adverts in their terribly implemented Yahoo! Mail. Just so you know I play fair, GMail is awesome and Flickr is the best there is (except they now allow horrible videos - what a complete waste)!
Labels: google, social-network, open-social, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, cloud-computing, yahoo
Inserted: 2008-04-25 12:18 (2 years, 3 months ago)
Just thought I'd update you all on 'The Footy'. Still something I miss from the UK but nevermind, there are things over here in NZ which can compensate for it.
I never wrote much about the Wellington Phoenix in the A-League last season. Overall it was a good year though I think we were all very optimistic at the start of the year. In the end, I think we did well and I'm glad we weren't bottom (thanks to Perth Glory for all those lovely points). I can't wait for the new season later this year.
Since December, I've been going to watch Team Wellington play in the NZFC instead and amazingly, after coming 3rd in the league, they managed to beat Auckland City in the play-off on Saturday and we look forward to a final with Waitakere United this coming weekend.
Liverpool also started the English Premier League well and finally it looked like the years of hurt would be over but no, we had a mid-season slump like we usually do and then you're out of the race. Since then we've been playing fantastic football (which proves we can do it) and have also had another great run in the Champions League.
Finally, my own endeavours. As usual, I'm still playing in the WIS Wednesday evening League 2 with 'Old Ladies from Picton' and am now also playing with 'Beerpots' in the Monday evening League 2. We also had a go at the outdoor competition earlier on in the year but got knocked out in the quarters. So overall, I'm enjoying it immensely with the main problem being my shooting - I get in the right positions but I need more accuracy.
Anyway, I'm just glad the footy and my involvment in it has gotten bigger this year - I so miss watching Football Focus and MoTD on Saturdays but at least there are some substitute footballing antics which help me along.
Labels: wellington-phoenix, liverpool, footy, team-wellington, 5-a-side
Inserted: 2008-04-16 23:12 (2 years, 3 months ago)
Quote from Port 25, a blog which describes itself as "Communication from the Open Source Community at Microsoft".
Reading this post from the Port 25 blog, it says:
Oh, but wait, what is memcached? memcached is really nothing more than a cache service for accessing data. Its origins are as a cache service for the RDBMS used by Facebook.
If you think that's true, then you don't deserve to have it. That's is all.
(BTW, the link in their very first paragraph to Danga states in the second paragraph that it was originally developed for LiveJournal, which we all knew.)
kthxbai
Labels: memcached, brad-fitzpatrick, danga
Inserted: 2008-04-16 18:58 (2 years, 3 months ago)
It is well known that the large majority of HTML pages out there are invalid HTML, use custom tags and have layout information mixed in with semantic information.
The real surprise though is that a lot of these pages have been crafted by professional designers and developers over the years. People who are actually being paid to create these things. Properly you might think. But no, not even close.
So if the people who are being paid to create the HTML can't create it correctly, what hope does that leave someone who isn't trained in it at all?
The answer is (of course) none. No hope whatsoever. Even assuming they have had minimal training in HTML, it just isn't enough.
But why is that whenever we have a new client and they say "And we want a WYSIWYG to be able to edit everything" we say without hesitation "Of course". In my view, the customer is not always right and it is wrong to give them that option.
I'm of the opinion that WYSIWYG editors are bad for clients to use especially because most editors generate HTML. The client moves on from wanting some minor formatting buttons and quickly on to "we want to edit all the HTML in the world directly".
This just causes problems. Not just immediate ones but long term ones too.
Firstly the client starts creating weird and wonderful effects (as shown today on Contented). Soon enough they start creating invalid, inconsistent and badly formatted HTML. It gets even worse when <font>, color="#bbb" and unclosed tags start appearing. Don't even get me started about embedding JavaScript in tags to popup a video window - it's not nice and it ain't pretty.
(Aside: I tried to explain unobtrusive JavaScript to a client once but I'm not sure I was explaining it on the right level even if there is such a level as a correct one.)
Even ignoring the actual edited HTML it also leaves the rest of the nicely groomed and well maintained site at the whim of someone who knows nothing about the web let alone the subtleties of HTML.
This practice is incorrect and this function should never be given to the client. It's in their best interests not to be able edit HTML and this practice should be changed.
Instead, clients should be given one of two options:
1) a a semantic markup language they can use which is relevant to their site. Anything to do with styles, layout and formatting is no concern of theirs. Instead they should know what a heading is, a paragraph, some emphasised text and what a link looks like. If you want to give them higher abstractions, how about an external link or a popup one. What about an embedded picture from a local store or from Flickr, or even a YouTube video. This is easy from your point of view and simpler from theirs (no more HTML cheat sheets for the editors).
2) or give them proper editing screens in the CMS which lets them edit only the content of the site. Whenever something should look different it should be because it is different not because someone says it should look different. The Content Management System should be for editing content and content only. It is not a Content, layout, formatting and stylesheet Management System. (And no, I don't believe they should be able to move blocks around in the CMS either but that's a different story.)
Let me give you an example of what happens now and what really should be happening. Let's say you have blog entries on the site each of which has a headline but depending on what type of blog entry it is (technical, opinion, guest), the sub-heading should look slightly different.
What happens now is the following. The editor says to himself:
"Hmm, this blog entry is an opinion piece so the subheading should be blue and bold, but this one is a newsflash, so the subheading should be red and flashing!"
This is bad. Bad, bad, bad.
To fix this you need to do some research on how many different types of blog entry there are. It's not so hard really.
You just quiz the client on how many blog entry types there are and arrange for the appropriate tickboxes, drop-downs or select boxes to appear in the CMS. This way the styles for every blog entry type are correct, consistent and don't look terrible. Furthermore, they are semantically defined rather than syntactically defined. (You have heard of the semantic web, haven't you?)
And finally, if those advantages weren't enough this last one really drums it home. When the site's design is changed in 2 or 3 years time and the blog entries have to look consistent with the new design, showing the sub-headings with the new correct styling is trivial.
Try doing that when your subheading has invalid, unknown and inconsistent HTML in it. Furthermore, if you think sub-headings are a problem, just wait until you get onto the blog entry itself, spotted and pitmarked with nasty HTML all over the place.
All I can say is, good luck to you or the poor person who has taken over on the project. That's going to one beast to untangle.
Labels: web, html, cms, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, content
Inserted: 2008-04-15 22:08 (2 years, 3 months ago)
The original title for this blog entry was "What's the difference between Google and Facebook?" Answer: Google is even worse than Facebook.
Let me explain what I mean by that and then I'll tell you why I changed it.
Google have finally entered the cloud-computing world for us mere developer mortals, a whole two years after Amazon gave us S3, EC2 and other web services. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'd think I'd be excited about this piece of news.
But I'm not and here's why.
Cloud computing, massively parrallel systems, distributed data storage and other things like that really interest me. What I want are the basic tools such that I can mold them, manipulate them and add to them to fit my needs. Basically, I want to use them however I see fit and I want to be able to do what ever I like.
But Google App Engine doesn't let you do that. It has some nice interfaces, yes, but in reality all you get are some abstractions built atop of Google's infrastructure. A lot of people are chuffed that they can now play with GFS and BigTable but in reality, how much of that do you actually see. Not much. It's just an API to you and me. An API written in Python which can only be run on Google's infrastructure.
So let me just recap that for you. To run your app on Google's infrastructure, you must use their code, their interface, their abstractions, their (single so far) language and their environment.
All in all it doesn't give you a lot of freedom. In fact, I don't see much freedom there at all. It's no argument that you'll be able to create great applications using all this infrastructure (think Gmail and Google Reader) but it's not that that I'm arguing against. You will have some slight leeway but really, why would you do it yourself when Google's way is just so much easier?
So far, I have told you that you have to do everything on their terms. Their language, their hardware etc but let me tell you something that concerns me even more than that.
It's also the fact that you'll be using their users. An API of their own design plugging in to their Accounts. You'd be able to do it yourself, sign up and manage your own users but in an environment like that, why would you?
This all reminds me of Google Gadgets - except you can write it in Python instead of JavaScript. You also get a little bit more functionality too but you're still using their infrastructure and their users.
I don't know about you but this seems like a bad idea to me. And now we're back to what this post was originally titled.
"What's the difference between Google and Facebook?"
Answer: Google is even worse than Facebook.
Let me explain.
Facebook has created a massive walled-garden of users, with high walls and plenty of pleasures inside to get those users in and not let them out. Hotel Calinfornia if you will except you can't even check-out let alone leave.
Keep the users inside, don't let them look at the rest of the web (in some cases, pretend it doesn't even exist) and just lock them in as much as you can. Facebook has turned into a horribly closed and restrictive site. That is why I quit earlier this year.
Over the years, Google have been doing the same except the walls have been growing a little more slowly. One new application at a time. The walls have been growing taller, lock-in has been getting bigger and finally we'll realise that we're inside a huge dome built on Google's servers and no-one can find the windows. Then all we can do is watch everyone suffer under the immense pressure of using all of these apps and not ever getting away from Google hosted stuff.
Just like the applications in Facebook. Yes, techically they can be hosted wherever, but the users are still locked in.
This is all made even worse by the fact that Google also made something that would stop Facebook having the monopoly on external applications for users - namely in the shape of OpenSocial.
I have written before why I don't like Open Social. Before they told us what it was about, I was really looking forward to having authorised access to user data. That wasn't what OpenSocial turned out to be - which is sad - and all we got was the ability to put applications into other sites. Again, Google App Engine is like this but worse - the only site (in regards to users) all of these new apps will run in, is Google's.
So more apps, more users, more developers to write more apps which attract more users and hence ... you see my point. And that's exactly their point too (stated in the introduction).
Which is funny, because that really reminds me of something else too. Vendor lock-in - but this time replace software and file-formats with users and applications. That's about where Google is at the moment and it's only getting worse.
Luckily some other people are also concerned about this. I can only hope that what Francois said to me today comes true. That Google can get it wrong at the start and it can get better as time goes on. I hope he's right and I truly hope that Google's "Do No Evil" policy wins through in the end even if that is debatable sometimes.
What Google can do to alleviate some of this is allow more open access for users and their accounts. It's a two step process with a third note:
(Note: None of these things provide technical freedom from their AppEngine infrastructure but I consider the user data is more important than that.)
I'm not holding much hope out though and whatever they do, I'm sticking to my view that Google are getting too big and too strong. At some stage in the future, their dream and marketing of an Open Web will descent into an Open Web of mostly Google Accounts and Google hosted apps and that's when we'll suffer.
But what can we do?
The easiest thing is for me to do what I did with Facebook and just quit Google. But the thought of finding replacements for all those services I'm using is too much - Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Bookmarks, Analytics and a few others I use. Some of which can be easily replaced (Magnolia for Bookmarks) but others less so (Analytics?). Now I realise I'm locked in and it doesn't sit pretty.
There's not an easy solution for this and one I'm thinking very hard about at the moment.
Earlier this evening, I finished re-watching the original Star Wars trilogy so I will leave you with a quote which seems apt for this situation. From the enigmatic Han Solo:
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
And the final thought for this post; let's just hope that Google never turn to the dark side.
Labels: openid, google, walled-gardens, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, facebook, app-engine
Inserted: 2008-04-11 00:16 (2 years, 3 months ago)
Every so often, the originality of the internet just amazes me.
Recently, after I've watched a film on DVD, I have watched the trailers afterwards to see how they put them together. Each time I have been amazed at how many times they throw clips in there - completely out of context - to make the trailer more intense.
It always just seemed a little fake to me and also proves that you can't trust a trailer to guide you on how good or bad the final film will be.
As conclusive proof, I just stumbled across a competition run in 2005 - as the BBC News reports:
In 2005, a film-making body in New York issued a challenge to America's assistant film editors - take an existing movie trailer, and re-edit it in an entirely different genre.
I have just watched three trailers which were entered into the competition and they're all hilarious. See for yourself:
and my personal favourite:
As I said, proof you can't trust the trailer and further proof that the internet is a funny place.
Labels: tinternet, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, trailers, movies
Inserted: 2008-04-06 11:04 (2 years, 3 months ago)
Once upon a time, I worked on the European Space Agency's Beagle2 probe which was supposed to land on Mars. Well, this isn't a story about that. That would be too sad.
But I do remember telling my brother that for the first few weeks of the project, I was "playing" with the prototype board trying to get it to run some Ada 83 programs. He started laughing at me and I asked why.
"Playing with something that costs millions of pounds - doesn't sound right to me."
But I explained to him that the only way to learn something is to have a play with it. That's what kids do and sometimes as adults we forget that it's not just one way to learn but the best way to learn.
Here's an opportunity to find out what all the fuss is about over the Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2. I have written an article called Getting Started with EC2 so just go over there and have a play.
And the funny thing is, it's just so easy, it's almost childsplay.
Labels: project-awssum, planet-geek, ec2, planet-catalyst, amazon
Inserted: 2008-04-03 23:45 (2 years, 3 months ago)
There's a lot of excitement happening in 'cloud' computing at the moment and I'm not surprised. People are finally realising the usefulness of fully distributed and tolerant systems.
I have harped on about Amazon and their Web Services on a number of occassions (dating back to October 2006).
Back when I first wrote s3bak I downloaded and installed the example Perl code Amazon provided 'as is'. But that wasn't good enough, I wanted to know more about the protocol itself.
Of course, there's no better way of learning something than actually doing it so I started implementing a library to talk to SimpleDB. Then I figured out that SQS and EC2 were pretty similar beasts and it just so happens that S3 could also be done in a similar way.
After a few weeks of hacking, I now have a reasonably complete set of simple modules which can talk to all of SQS, EC2, S3 and SimpleDB.
Project AwsSum comes with some straightforward command line scripts which allow you to execute commands against the services and see what's actually being queried under the hood.
However, the most interesting thing I've been working on are the new types of programs I would never have written if these services didn't exist.
As an example. I did 2 lightning Perl Mongers talks in March. The first was Talking to Amazon Web Services and the second Playing with Amazon Web Services (as always in lightning talks, they weren't long enough or in-depth enough). But I did write a program to demonstrate the power.
Using both SQS and S3, I wrote 5 simple programs to interact using only the queue as the interface between them (and only 3 of these were necessary). It's a simple demonstration but it shows the power gained by writing loosly coupled code. Quickly running through them:
(report-queue-progress.pl and report-bucket-contents.pl just report on the status of the queue and the files being stored.)
So in about 350 lines of code (130 being the processor) I have a simple gallery which uses no webserver, is fully distributed, is resilient to hardware failures and was written in less than a couple of hours. It also comes with an Amazon SLA which is higher than you could do yourself. And did I tell you the price - all this for around 3 or 4 US cents per month. Not bad eh?
If you want to have a play with Project AwsSum you can git clone at git://github.com/andychilton/awssum.git. I'd love to hear feedback - and remember, it's a work in progress :-)
P.S. I also have a tutorial giving examples of how to get started with EC2 using some of the newer features which have only just been released! Seeing as Geoff is giving a talk to us at Pizza Thursday tomorrow, I don't want to give the game away (just for you vex).
Update: so Pizza Thursday is *NEXT* week - I got it wrong. I apologise. Pizza Rage ensues on #catalyst.
Labels: project-awssum, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, amazon
Inserted: 2008-04-02 20:12 (2 years, 3 months ago)
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