Leveraging the Web: Caching

From Mark Nottingham - a nice success story about building on the Web, rather than along-side of it.
mnot?s Web log: Leveraging the Web: Caching

ahah - So that's how it's done

The microformats.org wiki has a discussion about AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) that describes an interesting approach to building dynamic pages - but I can't help wondering why the browser developers (like the WHAT-WG) just don't implement client-side includes? Something simple like <div src="latest.html" /> This avoids the need for client side script and ensures the browser can correctly manage connections, caching, authentication, etc.

Pricing Rules

How very interesting. I hadn't thought about price in this light before.

From Joel on Software

The answer is that pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It's the same reason we've had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it's good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that's a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists.

And Apple? Apple wants the signaling to come from what they promote on the front page of the iTunes Music Store. In the battle between Apple and the recording industry over who gets to manipulate what songs you buy, Apple (like movie theaters) is going to be in favor of fixed prices, while the recording industry is going to want variable prices.

A link is not a widget

Oh, this is so wrong...
Ruby on Rails makes it easy to "do a link via post" : see
Ajaxian: Ruby on Rails uses Ajax to simulate POST links.

This hack is purely to make a button in the user interface not look like a button. The problem is that most of the operations this is intended to be used with are 'remove' or 'delete' type of operations - actions that a user really really should know about ahead of time. More than once I've seen a link for "delete this picture" - just clicking causes the data to go away (Flickr is guilty of this). While I sympathize with a page designer trying for a spartan look and feel, it is important to realize that a link is not a widget. This breaks the explore-ability of Web applications and exposes destructive operations to utilities and tools that pre-fetch data - links should cause no harm.

To really get the job done, Web designers should do the work to define the CSS necessary for a form to fit within their design. Keep links safe - just say no to 'links via post'.

Amazon Mechanical Turk - Recognizing US Government in Seattle

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a cool system (a friend works on it). So I went through to see what it looks like.
One customer is A9 - they have visual Yellow Pages and need the community to vote on the best image among several for business storefronts.

I was suprised that my third HIT was a request to pick the best picture for "US Government Seattle". My choices were either a collosal two layer cement highway section, surrounded by rubble or a tree. I chose the tree.
US Government in Seattle, according to A9

The Boy Who Heard Music

So, Pete Townshend is writing science fiction - a dystopian saga with disturbing scenes and juxtapositions. The Boy Who Heard Music

South Park über Alles

I just found the South Park Studio - create SouthPark avatars of yourself and cow-orkers. Just perfect...

Steve Gillmor, Microsoft and Attention

Historically, I've assumed Steve Gillmor is just doing poorly at self-medicating himself, but recently I dredged up the coherent flotsam and jetsam out of his stream of consciousness labeled as 'articles'. His recent post about the Attention Bunny provided a succint summary of what he believes the coming Attention Economy is all about:

The key to this reboot is the understanding that page rank, and the fundamental search methodology of people looking for information, is about to be flipped on its head to a new model where the information is provided gestures of intention that allow it to target the user.

In my words - "You don't find the information, the information finds you". The difference between 'subscription' and 'attention' is the difference between boolean logic and fuzzy logic - one is a discrete 'subscribed or not subscribed' the other is a summarization over many events that signify interest in a subject or topic. Basically, pub/sub on acid. (You heard it here first...)


This is also interesting, in an 'opportunity' sense (emphasis added):

Gestures that span multiple engines and transports (AIM, GTalk, Skype IM, and Yahoo; Bloglines, Rojo, MyYahoo, Google Reader, Vista; the coming round of calendar gadgets; etc.) will inherently become more trustworthy as signals of interest than gamed links, walled garden cross and up-sells, and attempts at supplying authoritative information from incumbent publishers who can't or won't intermingle content from their competitors.

Google Base == Amazon Simple Queue Service++ ?

Hmm, this is interesting.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google Base == Amazon Simple Queue Service++ ?:

I'm still unclear as to why this is an interesting idea although I'm sure some clever geek will find some way to build something cool with it. I also wonder if this will spur Amazon into doing more interesting things with their service as well.

Well, one 'suggestion' from Google sounds suspiciously like Craigslist - "Listing of your used car for sale". As for spuring Amazon into doing more interesting things... hmm.

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is.

This is a pretty interesting piece from NYT - not ground breaking, we all know that we are more interrupt driven every day, but seeing it put into context is eye opening.

And of course, the obligatory quote:
Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times:

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is.

Intermind Communicator - Back to the Future

And I thought 1998 was a good year - this is an article from Oct 1996 issue of Tidbits about the now defunct
Intermind Communicator product (which really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the Web):

Intermind Communicator relies on the Web for transport and display, but builds in the active part of email, changing the dynamic of the communication process. Let me give an example of how this will work with TidBITS, since TidBITS is also being published via Intermind Communicator, using what Intermind calls a 'hyperconnector,' a small file that contains information about the item being published, including publication name, description, polling frequency, and so on.

First off, you install Intermind Communicator, which runs on your computer and uses a Web browser as its interface. If you want to receive TidBITS via Intermind Communicator, you subscribe to our hyperconnector, which is a matter of following a Web link to download the hyperconnector file and automatically add it to your Intermind Communicator database. Once that's done, Intermind Communicator reads the contents of the TidBITS hyperconnector and checks our Web server for updates once each day.
[...]
At its base, it's a database combined with a Web server that only works for a Web browser on the same machine.

The cool thing about Intermind Communicator - which sunk many years ago - is that it was an HTTP server on the desktop. Just like Google Desktop Search is today. And UPnP in Windows. And so on...

(But they don't have the cool 90's icon of Intermind...)

WHAT-WG - The Storage

Another really great capability that has been missing from browsers and the WHAT-WG is building is persistent client-side storage - see the Web Applications 1.0 spec for details.

The interface is also interesting - a uniform API with get/put semantics.

This will open up a lot of new application capabilities.

Web protocols, past, present and future

In his blog
Web Things, Mark Baker points to some original work on XML-RPC from 1998. This reminded me of some earlier work on XML over HTTP that was published on the W3C site. Here's an interesting quote from that paper:

Predicating the system on HTTP, URIs, and XML tightly constrains the solution set thereby increasing interoperability.

Another great quote:

One of the principles of this design is that if a client needs asynchronous notification then this should be accomplished via the HTTP protocol. This implies an HTTP daemon on the client. By unifying the Web client browser with a small (code of less than 2K in size has been realized) HTTP daemon, notification can be realized without undesirable timed polling, a bandwidth wasting technique which is beginning to appear more often.

Ah, those were the good old days... but the irony doesn't end. The current WHAT-WG is actively defining a new protocol for network connections within a browser, in order to provide a stateful asynchronous protocol for bidirectional realtime communication capabilities. I just say, put an HTTP listener inside the browser instead - httpd on the client.

Mule - How RESTful?

Huh, just noticed this (I think this is the first time I've noticed this... ) I'll have to investigate and report back how RESTful this is.

Mule - Universal Messaging Objects:

REST API to provide technology agnostic and language neutral web based access to Mule Events

Skyping a good deal on eBay

When I heard about eBay and Skype, my first reaction was how they could integrate buyers and sellers in an Internet enhance community. Sort of what this article from on ZDNet talks about. (emphasis added)

I realized that in some ways, what Oracle and eBay are doing is similar, although they're operating at opposite ends of the longtail: they're both selling tools for people who sell things to interact with the people who want to buy.

Hmm. What other companies likes to build tools for people who sell things? Google has Froogle and Google Talk - I wonder if those would be integrated following an eBay and Skype integration (whatever that might turn into).

More interestingly, Skype, with it's huge installed base and proprietary protocol would make a marvelous P2P auction platform.

I doubt Skype would morph into an auction platform - it's a phone and buddy list application. I could see integrated customer service, but that would cost a bunch of money and most eBay sellers don't have the profit margin for that. I think Skype is just a good business bet all by itself - the integration with internet commerce is just icing on the cake.

eBay has always been a walled-garden because eBay is afraid, and rightly so, that if they let merchants and customers contact each other directly, the transaction could happen off-network with eBay not getting their cut. Having control of the client on the desktop gives them better control and consequently enables richer merchant and buyer interaction–that's a big win for eBay.

Hmm, yes. Direct connect between buyers and sellers (disintermediation) is their big bugaboo, but Craigslist does this already and eBay has something like a 25% stake in Craigslist, so they are no strangers to that channel.

Internet scale integration on the rise

It's so thrilling to see a Microsoft employee promoting REST as an Internet-scale and Internet-friendly integration approach - almost as if he invented it.

From Dare (I'm not fired yet) Obasanjo's blog:

An interesting challenge I've faced at work is convincing some of the developers on my team that just because we use SOAP for the services we use internally, this doesn't mean we may not use alternate appproaches for Web facing services. This issue first came up when we decided to go with the MetaWeblog API as the blog editing API for MSN Spaces and I'm sure it will keep coming up.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. SOAP/WS-* are not the answer to every problem and just because they can't be used in a particular problem space doesn't mean that problem space any less valid than others. The sooner people understand the dichotomy that is intranet vs. internet service development, the better.

It lets people develop ideas you couldn't even think of before.

From an AlwaysOn article about disruption in Enterprise applications and a 'new platform' that will enable building new collections of applications:

It lets people develop ideas you couldn't even think of before.

Now where have I heard that phrase before? Are there any existing technologies have been observed to have exactly that characteristic?

Google's messaging

From a developer on Google Talk
Joe Beda's EightyPercent.net:

Most of the development was centered up here in the Kirkland office.

Hmmm. Kirkland. Internet messaging. Hmm. Rats. Wish I'd a known. Oh well.

On the brighter side, the direction seems to be decentralization and federation - meaning any site or provider can run their own messaging server (using XMPP). Although the Google client has no configuration for attaching to multiple servers, someone will do that soon enough. Now is the time for someone to build TopicZero - the root of all subjects.

Microsoft - Ahead of It's Time?

I happen to agree with Dare (mostly) on the point about MS and recent innovations -
Microsoft and Innovation: Always Ahead of It's Time or Bad Marketer?

"After watching a number of recent trends in the software industry I've been struck by how many of them were originally started by Microsoft but later abandoned only to be picked up by the rest of the software industry a few years later."

However, I don't think the Web APIs trend was really started from Microsoft. My exposure to XML, syndication and DHTML started at the same time as when Microsoft was building out those things Dare mentioned (I even worked at one of the fad 'push' companies) - but I don't recall Hailstorm as a leading edge of Web APIs. Most tech companies and independent technologists were doing that on their own - I even architected the main product of one company to use Web based access and XML as the root of it's remote API back in 1999.
Of the three examples Dare mentions, Microsoft demonstrated and delivered advanced concepts in the desktop arena, but not in the server space. It may sound like a cliche, but that's my recollection.

Amazon turns 10

Amazon is 10 years old this week - and two great musicians (Bob Dylan and Norah Jones) are going to give a show! But I'm going to be out of the country :(

This NYT article an Amazon is amusing - the 'analysts' still want Bezos to quit:

"But in general, the practice in the technology world is to bring in an experienced manager who can earn Wall Street's respect, either shortly after the founding of a company or just before it goes public."

This is kind of funny advice, since there is no other place that has the experience that Amazon needs to run the business. And Amazon historically has worked to earn the respect of customers - I think Wall Street should go earn their own respect. Also, the practice of bringing in new management - in general - also has happened just before a company vaporizes. Coincidence? I think not.