Adam Loving’s BlogSeattle Facebook, OpenSocial, and Web Development

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I’ve been trying to prioritize the requests I’ve had for StumbleRead. Thanks to everybody who has provided feedback.

1. Support for “Hide” (as defined by FriendFeed)

2. There is a bug when opening articles (for example from the New York Times) where the article takes over the StumbleRead frame. I’m not 100% sure I can fix this, but I will try.

3. “Next >>” bookmarklet. Just discovered that Google Reader has one of these, and it would be perfect for StumbleRead. Clicking the button would take you to the next unread item in your FriendFeed queue. (This would likely also entail “read item” tracking, though you could imagine it opening just the item with the newest comment or like).

4. Reverse sort order comments. Probably will make this a preference option.

5. Pop-out mode, where StumbleRead left hand frame becomes its own window (like a Web based Twhirl). it would still auto open posts, but allow us to see the URL of the content pane.

6. “Horizontal” mode. Just something I want to try. One item at a time in horizontal pane at the top.

7. FireFox add-in. This would probably be too much work for me to undertake. I’m hoping the combination of the above features will make an add-in unnecessary.

8. Skins. Would be great to have some alternate color schemes.

9. Search and filter. I really want to be able to filter to just videos or photos.

James Mowery has posted separately with some great suggestions for the ultimate FriendFeed client.

“Perhaps third-party developers should attempt to integrate more tabs and/or filters within a FriendFeed client. Why not have tabs or filters for each of the following: blogging activity, news activity, social networking activity, multimedia activity, shopping activity, comment activity, and more.”

#9 should cover that

“The interface should allow users to properly and intuitively manage, display, and sort comments.”

#4 should help

“Finally, the person or people who decide to make the ultimate FriendFeed client should find ways to extend FriendFeed’s uses. Honestly now, who knew that Twitter was going to be a popular service to track packages and calculate MPG rates? Who knew that it would turn the everyday person into a reporter? Who knew that it would be one of the most dominant marketing tools today? Who knew that it would change the world? FriendFeed’s third-party developers should apply all this knowledge to their creations.”

This is a big but fascinating challenge. FriendFeed is already so interoperable. What StumbleRead could do is package all the audio or video links into a playlist. Just one idea.

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Lookmarks is my simple link sharing site that died under the weight of link spammers (both bots and humans). I’ve been trying to think of a way to re-work the site to capture the enthusiasm of all those unexpected “customers”. I’ve got the site half-way ported to Google App Engine, and I’m taking an internet marketing course (I’m ashamed to admit) that I’m sure will influence my ideas further.

Goal

The goal is to build a quality link directory by encouraging self promotion and harnessing it to enforce quality (like Mahalo or Wikia but with controls instead of paid editors). The business model is AdWords and paid sponsored links.

Idea

Create a “digg” like system where you only ever vote on random links. You gain or lose credibility points based on how many people later vote the same as you.

Detail

The new Lookmarks works like a very simple social bookmarking site (with a search function), except by default links you add are only visible to yourself (and your friends).

In order to make a link appear public (and to other users that are not your friends) without having other people bookmark it, you must spend Lookmarks points (or dollars). You presumably only want to do this when you are trying to promote your own site. Once public, the link appears in anonymous search results and is indexed by Google (what the link spammers want).

Points are awarded to users based on their ability to predict how many other people will bookmark or “vote up” links. The site doesn’t allow you to go around voting on links because this would allow collusion between fake user accounts. One user could follow around another, bookmark everything and earn a ton of points. You can however, visit a special voting page that presents random links that you can vote on. You are presented with a screen like:

When searching for “Seattle restaurants” do you think most people would find the link below useful, informative, or entertaining… Yes or No

The prediction scoring in this case grants you one point for all the people after you that vote the same as you, and subtracts a point for everybody who votes differently. The volume of random links prevents collusion (the database is already seeded with 10s of thousands of questionable links). Even if you teamed up to vote yes on everything with the letter “X” in it, you’d have to wade through too many links to make the points add up.

Once you’d acquired some points, you could spend/deposit them on one of your links to keep it public even if it received negative votes. For example, you could put 10 points on it to counter-act 10 negative votes.

Just to re-iterate, only link spammers and super-contributors would care about earning points. Normal users could ignore them.

Issues, Questions, Refinements

1. Sites like delicious, faves don’t appear to need a points system - so captchas and spam filters are presumably enough to throw away the spam (discouraging the spammers instead of harnessing them).
2. Is the visibility of points (or spending points) necessary? We could just weight the votes of people who make best predictions. The points should probably be visible though as motivation.
3. Could streamlining the voting so that when you are submitting your link, you have to vote right then and there if you want to make your link public. Include paypal pay now button.
4. Scoring would be slow to get going. Could give everyone 5 points to start. Could make “random” selection weighted towards links that had 1 vote to speed up scoring.
5. How would you combine the UI of Digg and Delicious? Since use cases are different, should probably keep them separate. Could be separate views on the same database.
6. Would it be more efficient to force comparison between two links instead of voting on one?
7. Can I add one more feature that makes the world a better place (like improve link sharing for teams) to make this whole venture worthwhile.
8. Other random idea: award one point for each external domain that links to lookmarks (ick :)!)

What do you think of the points system? Should it be visible or invisible? The question is not whether or not you’d use the site, but whether link spammers would bother to go through the voting exercise.

David over at Design Commission captured a sampling of 92 home pages. It is a great compendium of the state of the art in Web Design.

Start Screens - a set on Flickr

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This is interesting, and certainly makes sense in the Facebook application world. Seems to me the Long Tail is already a prevalent concept in music though.

Prof. Elberse describes research showing that even in our cultural consumption we tend to be intensely social folks. We like experiencing the same things that other people are experiencing — and the mere fact that other people are experiencing and liking something makes us like it even more. Far from being cultural rugged individualists, most of us are only too happy to have others suggest to us what we’d like.

Portals - WSJ.com

Earlier this week I read about Zembly, a Sun “social” development project. One of the critiques against Zembly, is that it targets obscure app developers. I don’t see that as a problem for a development tool. Outfitters want to sell as many pick-axes as possible to gold searchers as possible?

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Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web - ReadWriteWeb

This is an interesting service making some really big claims architecturally. In fact the more I think about it, the more impossible it seems. Gnip is trying to become the hub for some really interactive sites. Piping all that data through their service and keeping up with all the changing APIs seems like a nightmare. Not to mention securing the requests and managing session keys…

I did have a related idea a few years ago about creating a unified (mostly read-only) interface to (non-personal) data provided by a multitude Web services. I will revisit that idea now that there the number of available datasources has multiplied 10 (or 100) fold.

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I was googling around for a free (and legally re-usable) text dictionary, and found this one with a very creative software license.

WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue to use it after a 30-day trial period.

Guess I’ll categorize this under both Technology and Travel.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Steve Rubel had an interesting post today about where you should invest your time “contributing” online.

Micro Persuasion: Should You Rent or Buy Social Real Estate?

“Renting” in this context means participating in discussion on someone else’s site (like Twitter). “Owning” means collecting content on your own domain (or blog). From the post:

It seems to me like “renting” online equity is now what’s in vogue. Long-form blogging is less prevalent because the competition for attention from pro-bloggers is steep. That’s why I love the Friendfeed model. It’s like a co-op. I can invest in my blog and realize benefits not only here but also on Friendfeed. Or, I can invest in Twitter and see the same return on Friendfeed, though certain provisions apply. You’re still beholden to the landlord.

I think MyBlogLog had the potential to be a better example than FriendFeed. I’m still enamoured with the idea, and am eagerly awating Google’s Friend Connect.

Slowly but surely desktop software is being replaced with Web based software. The Web browser is becoming a platform for more complex software applications - the window through which you do everything - not just browse the Web. Web based software (coupled with “cloudcomputing”) has many advantages such as, automatic updates, portability from one operating system to another, and centralized data storage. It has traditionally had its downsides as well, like security, network speed, and user interaction.

As computers get faster, and internet connections more pervasive, Web based applications are becoming more practical. All Web browsers need are a few more features like local storage and support for working offline to make them a viable environment for 80% of all software. The remaining 20% will require specialized user interfaces or hardware that will probably never be fully “Web based”.

Several technologies have been invented to add these features. For a while, it looked like Rich Internet Applications (”RIAs”, see Silverlight and Adobe Air) would win out as the next application platform. However, recently I’m becoming more convinced that a combination of AJAX and browser add-ons will win.

Just 6 years ago it was conventional wisdom that (at least within Microsoft) Web browsers had become just as complicated as they would ever. I remember a Microsoft employ saying “their may not be another version of IE after 6, I mean what else is there to do?” AJAX applications were too slow to really replace destop applications.

In its early days, Javascript was a pain to write and debug. However, Javascript has matured. There are many libraries now exist to improve cross-browser compatibility and facilitate high level programming concepts. For example:

• Javascript is Object Oriented
• Firebug is a decent debugging tool.
• Namespace Hacks keep code clean
  
• JSON beats XML as a data transmission format
  
• Functions are first class objects
• Reflection (types can be inspected and modified at runtime)
• Decent development environments (code completion in Aptana)
• Threading hacks and event libraries
• Many advanced animation and UI libraries to choose from

Lastly,  Javascript (and JSON/XML) is an open standard that is not championed by any one particular company. This is not a technical advantage, but a cultural one. Javascript is pervasive and a safe (reluctant?) choice because it won’t be going away for a long time.

So, with these advances in mind, what exactly will the Javascript browser platform of the future look like? Here are the contenders:

• Firefox + Google Gears
• Safari (aka Webkit platform) with special features for client side storage and animation
• Internet Explorer + What?

Microsoft is in trouble for a couple reasons. I’m not sure if Silverlight is meant give code running in IE access to the Operating System. Even if it is, IE is only supported on Windows.

It may be a bit premature to predict the end of most desktop applications, but it sure seems like those who have switched operating systems will recognize and speed up the trend.

Appendix

see also Yahoo’s BrowserPlus

Joshua Allen wrote an interesting post about how SearchMonkey is disruptive because it could enable semantic Web technologies. Basically the “Semantic Web” is a more meaningful internet (see my post from 2004 for a better description). Internet inhabitants have been trying unsuccessfully to bootstrap the semantic Web for a while. Google has the power to make it happen, but doing so would risk loosing their competitive advantage in Web search. If Google supported semantic Web formats like RDF, publishers would use it a lot more, and other search engines would have an easier time searching the Web.

SearchMonkey is interesting because it allows 3rd party developers to make use of Yahoo’s crawl of semantic data. This means the benefits of the index are shared without compromising Yahoo’s ownership of the index. The gamble is that Google won’t be able to keep pace with the 3rd party developers’ features, and that the features would be good enough to motivate publishers to provide feeds.

In the SearchMonkey architecture, publishers provide data (semantic information about what has traditionally been represented as text on their Web sites). App developers create Presentation Applications to match this data to search results (which is also semantically enhanced). So, if I search for “Coldplay” an Amazon search result could be enhanced with a Last.fm “listen now” link (or vice versa). The main point is that Yahoo search facilitates Coldplay being recognized as a band.

This seems to me like a good bet for Yahoo, if it isn’t too late for them as a business given their recent troubles. Assuming an audience of Yahoo searchers still exists, an app ecosystem like the Facebook developer ecosystem should develop trying to capture the users. Publishers will also be motivated Data Feed hosting will become just another part of SEO.

One last point is that this would be a great place for Evri (and Freebase) to plug in. Evri (still in private beta) has been criticized for not having a search box. This would be a great way to expose Evri’s semantic understanding of specific people when they show up in a Yahoo search result.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I got this question from a friend the other day:

do you know if you can transmit the internet signal in a wireless network to your tv?  now we attach our laptop directly to the tv with a VGA adapter.  I want to avoid doing this and maybe buy and attach  some type of transciever to the television to access  the internet while sitting on the couch in our living room.

I am looking for a good answer to this also  I used to use my Xbox to stream recorded TV from a PC upstairs, but the video was always choppy over the wireless connection, and now it just plain doesn’t work because of some setup issue.

I found a few questionable products. I really doubt the video quality - in home wifi doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit HD video in realtime, it has to be cached on the set top box.

The only established products that I know of are AppleTV and Roku Netflix. But both of those lock you in to either Netflix or iTunes. ZeeVee looks promising (but wired and expensive).

Anyone out there know of other alternatives?