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Archive for April, 2007

Webtops the sequel

April 11th, 2007

Two posts ago, i worked out the idea of a webtop, as suggested by someone who believed that it is the future of most graphical interfaces.
Well, i found this article, saying that no, they don’t think it’s going to happen.

Why it won’t work, according to them:

the whole ajax thing is too heavy on memory
(ever tried the hyped Yahoo Pipes ?)
it doesn’t really add any functionality as a trade-off for all the effort

I can add a few points of my own

security: we’re not out of the woods yet with javascripty applications
the sandbox: a browser normally limits your access to the machine – so any in-system checks like for instance showing your memory and cpu usage, or processes are not possible

On the other hand, there’s some nifty and fast web-applications out there – a lot of them by Google (whom most suspect will introduce an all-web desktop someday soon).
So i can’t really say how it will turn out.

I can only say that i like my desktop local, varied and open source, thank you very much.

On a more cheerful note: the bizarro link of the day
(Truman show frat-boy version. looks like he’s a chick magnet as well, could be the camera on his ear, sexy or what)
Now somebody please explain to me why this is a successful startup

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Posted in web2.0, webtop

Is there a case for microblogging ?

April 7th, 2007

I’m not an early adopter. The rebel in me scoffs at fads and hypes. Before i adopt a new idea or habit, i have to poke at it until it fits.
But, as i get older, i try to convince myself to be more hype-tolerant – there might be something to it, after all – so i decided to look into the phenomenon of microblogging, and be as neutral as possible.

What is microblogging ? Twitter’s FAQ:

Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool.

The description is pretty accurate, when you see what twitterbirds come up with:
“Wondering why our meeting was just cancelled.” – MissJenny
“watching TV, nothing good by the way!!!” – HernanGarcia

Interfaces to twitter: web, phone text and IM. The phone feature required me to text to a UK number, which is not exactly free. There’s a few extensions for firefox, and even a dedicated twitter client..

What would be the reason behind microblogging’s success ? The main feature of the human mind is endless curiosity. It has its good sides, since without our need to find out we wouldn’t have, say, antibiotics or microchips.
The less noble side of curiosity is a tendency to look through other people’s windows and see what they’re doing. I suppose microblogging is a fairly consensual way of doing this.

For companies, institutions, or John Edwards, obviously it’s a good PR tool – running communication
“blogging for lazy or busy people”.
family logistics: messages like ‘just went to the supermarket’, ‘i called the plumber’, ‘picked up the kids’
like the twitter definition says – if friends or loved ones are far away, it can provide insight in their lives
record-your-life: real-time journal of one-liners and trivia

I decided, in my mood of objective evaluation, to subscribe to Twitter, the main player in the field, and have a look. So i did. To be honest, I had a hell of a writer’s block – call me overly modest, but what i had for dinner is not that interesting (to me or to anyone else). You probably have to let go, get into the spirit to do a running comment, without caring about the information content or quality.

OK, i’m still not really convinced that it’s any kind of step for mankind.

However dubious i still find the whole idea, i think this mashup of map and twitter is quite poetic: you can see people commenting their lives all over the globe.

Other sites for microblogging: dodgeball, tumblr, VelvetPuffin

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Posted in microblogging, web2.0

Happy Saint Isidore !

April 4th, 2007

It’s Saint Isidore’s today – Saint Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of computers, internet and students. I found out through the weekly newsletter from a very well-documented french history site, Hérodote, which i recommend if you’re into that sort of thing.

My grandmother used to offer eggs to Saint Claire to have nice weather, and to pray to Saint Anthony to find lost objects.
So if your build fails, or your server goes down, maybe you should try praying to Saint Isidore of Sevilla (or offering him your mocha latte).

After all, as systems get more and more complicated, and every action has unexpected side-effects, we can use all the help we can get.

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Posted in random musings

Webtops, and your favourite brand of washing powder

April 3rd, 2007

Last week i attended a geek dinner for the first time – to be honest, until a few weeks ago, i was unaware of the concept, but googling it revealed that there’s lots of geeks eating together on this planet.

It was a success. The group was small, but composed of an exciting mix of entrepreneurs and high grade geeks. Fun and stimulating at the same time.

Now, this brings me to the subject of this post. Bart De Waele, who owns a web company, has a vision for the future of graphic interface: totally web-based. This sounded quite interesting, so i started working out that idea.

What does Joe Bloggs want out of his computer ?

mail
read the news
watch home videos (and porn)
buy and sell
document and spreadsheet editing
rework his holiday pics
maybe a calendar
maybe maybe blog or microblog

All these functionalities, as you know, are out there in easy to use net applications.

OS-wise, there’s no challenge there at all. You’d have an OS that’s similar to what exists, up to the window manager. Except that instead of the desktop, you’d have a toolbar-less browser. Let’s call it the webtop (found out someone thought of the name before me, no wonder). You wouldn’t even need an address bar, because the average user uses a search engine, and then bookmarks if he likes the page. Of course you’d still need a window system for the user who wants to see stock quotes while buying or adapting his spreadsheets.

The webtop would be a SSO portal-like thing, with access to your mail account, your bookmarks (= applications), your files (whether local or in some datacenter), your history, your favourite piece of music, the last videos you accessed, …

How would data be conveyed ? I suppose the current mix of (X)HTML, ECMAscript, XML and binary data would do, as long as standards are respected. The webtop application and OS wouldn’t need to be the same from one system to the next. As long as they can parse the stream and display it in a similar way from one device to the other, it would all look the same to the user (just like today’s web pages).

The crucial question is: who would serve the webtop ? A new business emerges: the webtop provider. The webtop provider will do it for free, or he will charge you if you don’t want adverts. What the hell, he’ll even offer you cheap hardware if you accept advert breaks every 15 minutes.

Let me explain: we accept more and more for our data to be put on someone else’s hardware. Think of the tons of personal mails we offer Google (with matching ads). With the webtop, if we’re not careful about privacy protection, we could expose pretty much everything, in the kind of data set every marketeer dreams about (data in, purchases out). Using advanced data mining techniques (support vector machines, topographic maps and whatnot) the provider could tailor the adverts in a way that would make AdSense look like random garble.

An IT-savvy/paranoid person could serve his own webtop if he even wanted to have one. There would also be open-source solutions out there to allow you to do this in an jiffy. But i’m afraid ease of use, genius marketing and attractive design still carry the day (MS anyone ?).