Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because …

Web Worker Daily has published the results and some of the submissions for their “2008 will be the year of the web worker because …” contest.  It’s an interesting read.

To some, those postings could sound like a bunch of nonsense from a few lunatics.  And to be honest with you, that’s not far from the truth right now.  But this is not the first time we’ve been there.  Today’s web workers include  many technical people, who already saw the “this is nonsense” and “it will never happen” attitudes before, when Open Source Software was as much of a dream as free wireless access to the Internet, when Microsoft was an unshaken monopoly, when nobody could put “Linux” and “desktop” in the same sentence, when “web standards” were supported only by their unknown authors, when Altavista was thought to be the best search engine, when … You get the idea.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because web workers believe it will be so.

Everybody knows everybody. Almost.

Social Times report:

One really sweet feature that has been added to this LinkedIn update is via a partnership with Business Week. While reading articles on their site, you can see how you are connected through LinkedIn to the companies and individuals mentioned in each article. That definitely makes the news much more personal.

That definitely makes the news much more personal.  That definitely shows how small (and flat?) the world is becoming…

Google Profile coming up

In my recent post about Google Reader and Google Talk integration I mentioned that it would be nice to have a possibility to control friends’ names and pictures.  Similar to the way I can do so in Gmail.  Having things a bit more centralized would be nice.

Obviously, Google realizes that.  They are some of the smartest people put together after all. Well, it looks like we’ll have something centralized in the near future.  Web Worker Daily runs a post about Google Profile.  Good news.

And while I was going through that stuff, I had a thought (yes, again).  Google must have some really nice tools for its developers. Usually, companies try to maximize the utilization of available resources, boost code reuse, and minimize time spent on re-implementing things.  Google shown a few decentralized bits over time.  Like this contact management issue, for example.  That probably means that creating something like Google Profile (simple, but very scalable application) has been made extremely easy.  It’s like it is easy to make one rather than to decide if one is really needed and what are the alternatives and how to use those alternatives. That, or they have some a weak approach to code reuse – something that I find hard to believe.  Either way, it’s interesting…

Passing forward with Google Reader

One of the cool things that can be done with the Google Reader (now that it integrates with Gtalk contacts), is proxying of items from one set of people to another via a common connection.  Consider, for example, my contact list with Person A and Person B, both of who don’t know each other, but share a common interest.  Person A is subscribed to Mega Feed RSS, which neither me, nor Person B is subscribed to.  One day there is a really cool post in the Mega Feed RSS, which Person A markes as “shared”.  Since Person A is in my contact list and I decided to see his shared items too, that item will popup in my Google Reader.  I’ll read it, and then decide that it is indeed a great post which some of my other contacts might be interested in.  Instead of annoying them all with an email, I’ll just mark it as “Shared” in my Google Reader, and this item will appear in Person B’s items from friends.

Here are the nice parts of the above process:

  • One news channel for everything – your news, and news from your friends.  No mixing of RSS items with emails and IMs.
  • No data duplication.  We don’t copy-paste and send the item over and over again.  Instead, we just share the same piece of data.
  • Control of the incoming streams in user hands.  If you don’t like the items someone is sharing, just “hide” the user via “Settings”.  Nobody is annoying anybody.
  • People in your contact list help you find the sources and content that you might be interested in.