The Roads Less Travelled …

This is just so weird that I have to abandon my blogging stupor and write about this. Today, I saw three comments on this blog; a number beyond my imagination.

But all of them turned to be on one post: the rather spare review I had written sometime back of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. Given the content of the books I am not surprised that there is a campaign against them by the established church. And with a well publicized movie in the wings (and I heard of the books from the trailers shown before Spiderman III) a larger number of people are going to be exposed to it. Hence, the ongoing war to the movies and the books has shifted to the internet.

All that aside, clearly the comments on my post were spam. They all sounded the same, lacked a single coherently strung thought and were posted on the same day at very similar times. But the wondrous thing was narrowness of the spam attack or that the excellent Akismet spam catcher failed to catch it. To the casual reader, they might even look like genuine comments so pertinent are they to the theme of the post.

And suddenly, I shudder at the thought of a future where with considerable amount of my personal information on public domain I will be subjected these inane but outwardly pertinent messages.

The recent technology survey by Economist has a article that points to the development of common standards in the world of online gaming that would lead to the creation of a platform. This would enable developers to create applications with all the advantages of a virtual 3-D world without worrying about the underlying mechanics of the platform.

The freeing of the applications from the platform will allow this platform to be used for more than just the next innovative video game. A recent Business Week article says IBM is using games like these as training platforms for management under various scenarios. In today’s world where the ability to get into a situation fast is a skill paramount for any aspiring manager such games will provide a easy way to build up their skills virtually without actually waiting to get a chance in the real world. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, if the platform for online 3-D rendering engines become standardized we would see a burst of creativity that would dwarf anything we have seen so far - including the browser.

Michael Calore, a Wired news editor, recounts his month long sojourn into the world of web applications away from the world of traditional desktop applications. Makes for interesting reading and allows one to gauge to an extent if web apps are ready for prime time.

While his overall experience sounds great, he does raise a couple of very valid points about the viability (and areas of improvement) of web applications in general and Goggle Apps in general.

1. Interoperability: Ideally we should be moving into a world where open standard would make this word a redundant issue. However considering the length of time we have stuck to our closed boxes (read desktop applications) this is going to be a major pain in the a*#. Web applications being new would need to integrate into the historical apps rather than them adhering to standards. This would become important in large organizations and groups.

2. Security: Michale talks about the fears people have regarding the security of their data. Sadly, it seems to me that Google is playing down those fears as being invalid. Yes, we do not understand how the current desktop applications work. And yes, they do have security loop holes. But the scepter of all my data lying around in the data center open to anyone with admin access on the Google data center in scary. And then I really do not know what Google is doing with my data. And since it has all my data it becomes much easier to target me. I am not saying they are valid fears, but they are genuine fears that consumers have and Google and others like Zoho attempting to wean away people from desktop applications have to understand and ameliorate.

3. User Experience Paradigm: Again, I see here Google trying to play down the nature of the problem. If web application suites are to make money by themselves (for Google this might very well not be the case), they better take this into account. The people deciding things in an organization will be the ones tied to the desktop metaphor and they will be loath to change their styles and the young turks entering might find it better to adapt to the desktop metaphor rather than fight for the validity of the using the web application style of doing things. They would have, I am sure, other important battles to fight.

However, Michael’s experiment has demonstrated that Web Apps do present a viable alternative to small groups and organizations where everyone is committed to using the same platform. Personally, I have almost shifted to the web for email and chat. The office suite however remains solidly in place.

My laptop has these nice buttons that help me control my music player (Winamp, in case you are curious) physically rather than alt-tab to the application. The volume controls are also in the same physical panel. I am very happy with it, since it causes me the least distraction from my work and allows me to be more lazy. Now Opera, which is my preferred browser when I am, well, browsing (since now I also read RSS feeds, write blogs, upload photos to Flickr and stumble around the web using the browser), for some weird reason deactivates these controls making me very very unhappy. Opera is an awesome browser, with probably the fastest rendering engine in business but simple things like these will make customers turn away from them.

On a complete different level, and related more to privacy and security issues rather than usability is Google’s use of the cookies to remember your identity once you have logged in from a certain machine. John Batalle here, links to a story which describes in detail how someone using a computer, you logged into months ago could potentially be privy to your most recent searches. As far as I know, the same model holds for Gmail also though I have not tested it yet. However, for Orkut the model is different. Clearly, technology is not the problem here. Is the drive to garner personalized data on the user so focal to Google’s strategy that it has pushed these issues under the carpet. And some will argue that since Google is a free service, if you don’t like them, you can ditch them. This would be completely opposite to what Google actually intends; since these customers coming to the main site by millions in a day fuel its ever growing ad revenues.

Techcrunch recently put up this interview with Paul Graham (the one who thinks painters and hackers are alike). Some comments that I found interesting …

“it’s an interesting data point that a company with $88,000 in funding can even compete against one with $2.8 million. That could not have happened before the web.”

“experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.”

“We print it on T-Shirts: “Make something people want.” If you had to reduce the recipe for a successful startup to four words, those would probably be the four.”

“Most of the great startups seem to have begun with something the founders wanted: Google, Yahoo, Apple, even Microsoft.”

In general he speaks about the uselessness of having a business model without a good idea, how google is beatable, and how doing something that you like to do is more important than what you think the market might want you do.

Blogged with Flock

Installed Flock 0.7 (beta) version in my attempts to find the perfect browser for my tastes.

The wysiwyg editor for blogging definitely looks cooler than the performancing plugin on firefox, and the flickr toolbar on top is nice. The news reader is good; a funkier version of Sage perhaps. But so far the bookmarking tools have left a lot to be desired.

Overall the beta release is a much more polished version than the numerous developer previews that I installed earlier.

Will prolly post a detailed review after using this for some more time.

update 1: I really disappointed with the application’s ability to work with exisiting posts. Does not allow me to edit posts that I had created earlier :(. Also everytime I edit a post it takes a long time to retrieve it from my blog. Wonder why they do not hold a local cached copy of the blog in the HDD. If wordpress could import my entire blogspot blog this should not be too difficult.

update 2: The snippet bar in the bottom of the page is sheer brilliance. Something that I was hoping someone would do for a long time. You can drag photos and text snippets both into it, save them and reuse them in blog posts and other places. Amazing!!! Though I have not used this feature extensively, I am hoping that there is some kind ordering/tagging mechanism in place because these snippet holders soon become too cluttered to do any proper work with.

update 3: The flickr uploader is also slick though has not yet offered anything out of the ordinary from the numerous uploaders existing all over the web.

Blogged with Flock

Here is a good read on my ex-employer Pi Corporation; while the article says much is under the shadows as it is PI delivers a platform circumventing not only the problem of personal data limited to a machine as in standalone Windows desktop as Paul Maritz says in the article but it also smartly manages to overcome the privacy concerns that people have in uploading sensitive information onto central servers as is the wont of Google and Yahoo.

When Google launched Gmail with the adsense program, the backlash it faced brought into question their entire existence; it seemed for a time that it was well in the way of becoming the next Big Brother. Though that storm has died down, it emphasized once again how important the concern of privacy of data is. The essential difference in the way that Google (and Yahoo to some extent) are trying to solve the problem is to appropriate the user data by uploading it to a central server. To be visible to the entire web you have to be on the web. And being on the web raises privacy concerns. Sort of a catch-22 situation. But PI, I believe has managed to go solve this situation in a very unique manner by putting together a set of solutions for seemingly unrelated problems.

Though not a part of the team any longer, I am still rooting for them. Can they become the next big thing? That would depend on many other issues other than just the technology demonstration and we would have to wait and watch.

I can finally justify the shifting of my blog from blogger to wordpress - mainly for two major improvements in the wordpress offering.

One, the siderbar widgets allow me very easy customization of my blog. Though it is not anywhere close to full control, for majority of the bloggers it will be good enough. Also some new themes (including the one on my blog) have been added. Each theme seems to carry its own baggage of customization. Maybe the wordpress guys can look into some standardized way of publishing the data on the sidebar so that all theme creators can use them and create their themes.

The last and the truely awesome feature was import; basically allowing me to import the content from my older blog into wordpress. The service took care of importing all the posts and comments from the blogger account. From what I could glean, the import is basically HTML scraping from one’s older blog; convert the blog into a standard format, take information for each post out and then go to each post’s page and get the data alongwith the comments. The only thing missing here, seemed to be some kind of a bulk categorization tool for the newly imported posts. Also such an activity clearly shows the limitations of RSS as a publishing standard for huge content.

So now one can find whatever I have written or attempted to write in the last 2 years in this blog itself.

Technorati Tags: software, internet

I generally stick to the software I get used to. For me the difficulty is the initial choice and not the fending off the claims of other products (free or otherwise) once a choice is made. I still use notepad as my primary text editing tool and shifted from IE to Firefox or Outlook to Thunderbird only when I started working on multiple environments after shifting to PI. Though the working on multiple environments did not continue too long I had become besotted with both. However tragically for me I have just spent an hour installing yet another feed reader for reading my feed subscriptions, shifting from the RSS reader which comes with Thunderbird to Omea Reader. Ironically I was in the meanwhile listening to the Talkcrunch’s latest episode on the battle of online feed readers.

I have a some requirements from any such application:

1. Speed. Once I click on a post item I really do not want to wait till it loads. Any feed reader is given enough idle time by me to use for downloading updates. Thunderbird failed on this count, it took like ages to get feeds and worst of it all it got it all in real time. Almost all online feed readers fail on this count as well. Plus opening a web page and login in is too much work to read a feed. Regardless of what they claim they do not really give a good enough user experience to overcome this inertia.
2. Priority of posts. I want to priotize feeds so that updates to those appear at the top of the list if unread. None of the feed readers I have used has this yet. Does not look like a great deal to develop. Also over a period of time, my feed reader seems to acculumate a list of quasi interesting feeds that i have stupidly added. Adding some minimal intelligence to these readers to identify what I would be interested in currently is needed.
3. Auto cleaning of posts. I really do not want to keep Slashdot posts of last week, while I do want to keep the Techcrunch posts or Paul Grahm essays for future reference.
4. Good HTML rendering. The guys who publish the blogs really put in some effort towards making their posts more readable for the users. The feed reader has no business of taking away this luxury from me.
5. Low CPU usage. I hated my first reader SharpReader for this reason. It used loads of CPU in the days when computing power for me was at a premium. And I hate freewheelers.
6. Ability to search and label important posts. Search through the existing posts in the reader as well as allow me to label (or tag) a particular post as being important or as pertaining to a certain topic. This information should not be lost even if the original post is deleted for reason.

With Vista coming in with an inbuilt framework for syndication with RSS and Atom, I believe that these demands are not unreasonable. But how long will the wait continue?

Technorati Tags: computers, feed readers