Web work

YouTube Social

The idea of social television is not particularly new. People have been watching TV together for years. Now that a lot of entertainment is moving online, social digital TV is a cool idea. I’ve heard about a few attempts to implement it before, but I haven’t actually seen one up-close. Via Download Squad I’ve learned today about YouTube Social. I think it’s pretty cool, even though it’s definitely not perfect.

It’s really simple to try. Just go to YouTube Social and search for videos using a familiar YouTube interface. Either play them immediately or add them to the queue. If you have a Facebook account, authorize YouTube Social to use it, so that you could add friends to your session easily. If you don’t have Facebook account or don’t fancy the authorization, you can still use YouTube Social. It’s just that you and your friends will be assigned anonymous names like ‘guest123’. You can either send your friends a tiny URL to join the session or an automated Facebook chat invite.

When your friends join the session, you are all watching videos synchronized. Which means that all of you see the same video at the same time. And you can talk about it in the chat window while you are watching it. User with the remote control can pause, play, and find more videos to watch. The remote control is just a token, which can be passed around like a regular remote control. Overall, pretty awesome!

There are really only a couple of things that I didn’t enjoy – chat only works with Latin characters (Cyrillic simply don’t show at all) and the Facebook-only login option (no Twitter/Google/etc). The user interface could use some polish, and I’m sure it will get some in the near future.

Overall, a very nice execution of the idea in demand.

Happy 6th birthday, Firefox!

Download Squad reminds us that it has only been 6 years that Firefox is with us. That’s true, but I find it so hard to believe. What was the web experience before Firefox came along? I remember that Firefox made it way better, but I don’t really remember how bad it was before that. And even though I spend most of these days using Google Chrome, I clocked thousands of hours in Firefox and it is almost like a relative to me.

Happy birthday dear browser! Best wishes and may you continue to improve, especially now that you have some competition to get you going.

Web designers are all the same. Almost. Sort of.

I came across an excellent graphical representation of a number of web design and development surveys, such as A List Apart Survey. The infographic pulls results of several such surveys into a single long image with graphs and stats. One thing that I was surprised by was how narrow the results profile the average web designer. There’s almost no distribution of value across the any chart – age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, education, etc. It almost looks like that web designers are a product of the single factory. Have a look and tell me if you don’t agree.

Being surrounded at work by web designers developers for the last few years, I have to say that even though I know a few exceptions to the average, the majority seem to fit the profile just right. I think we could use more variety, but I have no idea on how we could actually get it.

Automattic becomes domain registrar

Matt Mullenweg reports in his blog that Automattic became a domain registrar.

As some folks have noticed already, Automattic is now a “real” domain registrar (ID #1531). This has been a goal of mine for several years now, chiefly because I am a bit of a domain collector myself and I’ve never been completely satisfied with the domain buying or management experience on any of the usual players. Second, custom domains are a popular feature on WordPress.com and should become even more popular with some changes we’re introducing this month and it’ll be good to be able to provide a fully integrated experience for our users there. It’ll be a few months while we build all the tools necessary to begin taking advantage of our registrar status so in the meantime we’ll continue to use Godaddy, who has been an excellent partner.

These are excellent news! I do agree with Mutt that current domain registration and maintenance experience is a pain in the back. No matter which registrar you choose, there is always something awkward about it – prices, support, control panel, etc. I am using GoGaddy for a few years now, and while they provide excellent discounts and DNS hosting uptime, their control panel is horrible. Yet, it’s still better than most.

Automattic on the other hand, is a company known for it’s humanity in policies and user interfaces. WordPress being just one of such examples. Them becoming a domain registrar gives me great hope of having a better domain registration and maintenance experience one day.

Google Translate tip for Google Chrome

Here is something that I thought of today, played with, and found quite useful – integration of Google Translate with Google Chrome via the search engine configuration. Of course, I know that there are addons for Google Chrome to integrate Google Translate. Of course, I know that Google Chrome comes with certain integration out of the box. But what I need is something else. Once in a while, when I write an email or a blog post or something like that I’d forget a word in English that I know in Russian, or the other way around. I usually open a new tab, go to Google Translate, and type the word in faster than I think of a better way to solve the problem. It’s a completely automated process for me. My fingers know how to do it. Plus it’s all so fast because I do it from the keyboard with shortcuts, so even if I’d have some addon installed with a button in the toolbar, I’d need to reach for the mouse, which would slow me down.

So, here is what I did. I went to Options->Basics->Default Search->Manage. Of course, I didn’t want to change my default search engine from Google to anything. Instead I wanted to add a new search engine. See the above screenshot. I named the search engine “Google Translate (English->Russian)” to avoid ambiguity when I add more search engines for translations between other languages. I assigned the keyword “en,ru”, which is what I’ll have to type in the address bar for this search engine to kick in. And I configured the search URL. Nothing fancy.

Now, whenever I type “en,ru” in the browser address bar, Google Chrome switches from generic completion to a search engine, where I just have to type the word that I want translated and hit Enter. Again, see the screenshot above for how the address bar looks.

In exactly the same way I can add more search engines to translate between different languages. It’s even possible to use “auto” as the source language for Google Translate to figure out in which language the original word or phrase is. And, of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to Google Translate search engines only. I have search engines defined for PHP functions lookup, Wikipedia and IMDb searches, and more. The trick is to find the search URL by performing the actual search on the site that you want to add, and then replace the search query with “%s”. That’s all. Enjoy!