Google Wave alternatives

Remember Google Wave?  Yes, quite a handy collaboration tool that mostly failed due to a silly invitations-only policy stretched over way too longer than it should.  Well, apparently, even after Google gave up the idea and most of its code as Open Source, there are still people who work on making it succeed.

Save Google Wave is the website that keeps track of several alternatives and provides a simple functional overview of each.

Happy birthday, Evernote!

Evernote is one of the most useful web services out there.  I am using it daily for two and half years, and I’m also a subscriber to their Premium service, which makes it possible to have off-line notebooks on mobile.  Today, Evernote celebrates its fifth birthday.

evernote 5 years old

Huge thanks and congratulations to the whole team on this huge milestone. I hope you guys will continue doing what you are doing and bring us more handy features.  Keep it up and happy birthday!

GitHub’s Data Challenge II winners announced

GitHub, being a massive data store, is constantly looking for new and improved ways of extracting knowledge from its data.

In April we announced the second annual GitHub data challenge.

[…]

After receiving some amazing entries in the previous challenge, we were excited to see what people would discover with another year of data. The results blew us away: we saw many more entrants and novel applications of our data. GitHubbers ranked their favorite entries, and after tallying the votes, we’re happy to announce the top 3 entries for the 2013 GitHub data challenge.

The second place (Popular Convention by Outsider) and third place (open source contributions by location by David Fischer) winners are very nice.  But the first place winner is truly amazing (The Open Source Report Card, by Dan Foreman-Mackey).  It’s an excellent combination of data crunching with beautiful presentation.  Of course, you’ll need some publicly visible repositories and contributions to see anything interesting, but once you do, it’s quite impressive.  Have a look at mine, for example.

Google adds QUIC protocol to latest Chrome build, delivering HTTP over UDP

Google adds QUIC protocol to latest Chrome build, delivering HTTP over UDP

Here are the QUIC highlights Google wants to emphasize right now:

  • High security similar to TLS.
  • Fast (often 0-RTT) connectivity similar to TLS Snapstart combined with TCP Fast Open.
  • Packet pacing to reduce packet loss.
  • Packet error correction to reduce retransmission latency.
  • UDP transport to avoid TCP head-of-line blocking.
  • A connection identifier to reduce reconnections for mobile clients.
  • A pluggable congestion control mechanism.

In other words, QUIC is yet another protocol that Google is building to help speed up the Web. It has already done so notably with its SPDY protocol, which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol.