"web2.0" entries

Four short links: 10 November 2011

Four short links: 10 November 2011

Access Over Ownership, Retro Programming, Replaying Writing, and Wearable Sensors

  1. Steve Case and His Companies (The Atlantic) — Maybe you see three random ideas. Case and his team saw three bets that paid off thanks to a new Web economy that promotes power in numbers and access over ownership. “Access over ownership” is a phrase that resonated. (via Walt Mossberg)
  2. Back to the Future — teaching kids to program by giving them microcomputers from the 80s. I sat my kids down with a C64 emulator and an Usborne book to work through some BASIC examples. It’s not a panacea, but it solves a lot of bootstrapping problems with teaching kids to program.
  3. Replaying Writing an Essay — Paul Graham wrote an essay using one of his funded startups, Stypi, and then had them hack it so you could replay the development with the feature that everything that was later deleted is highlighted yellow as it’s written. The result is fascinating to watch. I would like my text editor to show me what I need to delete ;)
  4. Jawbone Live Up — wristband that sync with iPhone. Interesting wearable product, tied into ability to gather data on ourselves. The product looks physically nice, but the quantified self user experience needs the same experience and smoothness. Intrusive (“and now I’m quantifying myself!”) limits the audience to nerds or the VERY motivated.
Four short links: 4 May 2011

Four short links: 4 May 2011

WYSIWYG HTML5 UIs, Hacker News, Real Time, and Web 2.0

  1. Maqetta — open source (modified BSD) WYSIWYG HTML5 user interface editor from the Dojo project. (via Hacker News)
  2. Hacker News Analysis — interesting to see relationship between number of posts, median score, and quality over time. Most interesting, though, was the relative popularity of different companies. (via Hacker News)
  3. Real Time All The Time (Emily Bell) — Every news room will have to remake itself around the principle of being reactive in real time. Every page or story that every news organisation distributes will eventually show some way of flagging if the page is active or archived, if the conversation is alive and well or over and done with. Every reporter and editor will develop a real time presence in some form, which makes them available to the social web. When I say “will” I of course don’t mean that literally . I think many of them won’t, but eventually they will be replaced by ones who do. (via Chris Saad)
  4. Changes in Home Broadband (Pew Internet) — Jeff Atwood linked to this, simply saying “Why Web 1.0 didn’t work and Web 2.0 does, in a single graph.” Ajax and web services and the growing value of data were all important, but nothing’s made the web so awesome as all the people who can now access it. (via Jeff Atwood)
Four short links: 7 October 2010

Four short links: 7 October 2010

Managing Mistakes, Paying for APIs, Gaming Gmail, and Classy Twitter Engineering

  1. How to Manage Employees When They Make Mistakes — sound advice on how to deal with employees who failed to meet expectations. Yet again, good parenting can make you a good adult. It’s strange to me that in the technology sector we have such a reputation for yellers. Maybe it’s business in general and not just tech. […] People stay at companies with leaders who rule like Mussolini because they want to be part of something super successful. But it does tend to breed organizations of people who walk around like beaten dogs with their heads down waiting to be kicked. It produces sycophants and group think. And if your company ever “slips” people head STRAIGHT for the door as they did at Siebel. I’d love to see a new generation of tech companies that don’t rule through fear. (via Hacker News)
  2. Information Wants to be Paid (Pete Warden) — I want to know where I stand relative to the business model of any company I depend on. If API access and the third-party ecosystem makes them money, then I feel a lot more comfortable that I’ll retain access over the long term. So true. It’s not that platform companies are evil, it’s just that they’re a business too. They’re interested in their survival first and yours second. To expect anything else is to be naive and to set yourself up for failure. As Pete says, it makes sense to have them financially invested in continuing to provide for you. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a damn sight better than “build on this so we can gain traction and some idea of a business model”. Yet again, Warden reads my mind and saves me the trouble of finding the right words to write.
  3. 0Boxer — Chrome and Safari extensions to turn gmail into a game. (via waxy)
  4. Twitter’s New Search Architecture (Twitter Engineering Blog) — notable for two things: they’re contributing patches back to the open source text search library Lucene, and they name the individual engineers who worked on the project. Very classy, human, and canny. (via straup on Delicious)
Four short links: 16 September 2010

Four short links: 16 September 2010

Javascript Terminal, Visual Query Explainer, New Google Courses, and Cloudtop Apps

  1. jsTerm — ANSI-capable telnet terminal built in HTML5 with Javascript, Websocket, and Node.js. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
  2. MySQL EXPLAINer — visualize the output of the MySQL EXPLAIN command. (via eonarts on Twitter)
  3. Google Code University — updated with new classes, including C++ and Android app development.
  4. Cloudtop Applications (Anil Dash) — Anil calling “trend” on multiplatform native apps with cloud storage. Another layer in the Web 2.0 story Tim’s been telling for years, with some interesting observations from Anil, such as: Cloudtop apps seem to use completely proprietary APIs, and nobody seems overly troubled by the fact they have purpose-built interfaces.

Velocity Culture: Web Operations, DevOps, etc…

Velocity 2010 is happening on June 22-24 (right around the corner!). This year we’ve added third track, Velocity Culture, dedicated to exploring what we’ve learned about how great teams and organizations work together to succeed at scale.

Web Operations, or WebOps, is what many of us have been calling these ideas for years. Recently the term “DevOps” has become a kind of rallying cry that is resonating with many, along with variations on Agile Operations.

Ignite Bay Area @ Web 2.0 Expo Tonight

Ignite Bay Area is happening tonight to help kick-off Web 2.0 Expo. We will be returning to the Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street, SF). As always these will five-minute, 20 slide presentations on geeky topics. We will hear from the likes of Jen Bekman, Derek Dukes, Jesper Andersen, and Tobias Peggs and we are sponsored by .CO. Expect to be…

State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars

As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.

Why f8 was good for the open web

Disclosure: I joined Facebook last Fall. Over a year ago I predicted that they would open up. It's easy as a technologist to think about openness solely in terms of technology, but openness is broader than that. Openness of technology means that others can build using the same tools that you do. Openness of data means that developers can build…

Preparing for the realtime web

How the shift to realtime will affect the web (and why info overload is overblown).

The stream of updates and links that powers the realtime web is giving static websites a run for their money. In this Q&A, "Building the Realtime User Experience" author Ted Roden discusses the impact of the realtime web on developers and users.

What will the browser look like in five years?

Opera's Charles McCathieNevile on the web browser's near-term future.

The web browser was just another computer application five years ago. Now, it's become not just a portal to the Internet, but an application hub as well. In this Q&A, Opera's Charles McCathieNevile looks ahead to the web browser's next five years.