Category: xml and web 2.0

Of course not, but finally thankfully people are starting to take serious stock of other types of Databases. I'm no Database expert but for ages I never understand why I was serialising XML into a relational database to pull it out a bit later in XML. So I started doing some digging and found out about XML databases and object stores. This was way back in 2001. Later in 2004, the suggestion of a XML database or any other database except MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle was a no go. How things have changed.

In BarCampLondon7 Simon Wilison gave a talk where he listed a range of different types of databases or datastores. There all listed on this Etherpad titled #bcl7 non-relational database BoF. A very impressive list indeed and there's much more. So will we finally see people moving away from the LAMP stacks? Maybe but I its going to take a while.

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Its been ages since I've written in my blog, so I'm hoping to try and make up for that with a series of blog posts over the weekend.

While at BarCampLondon7, I attended a couple of sessions about some very cool technologies which Google are behind. Like most of you I'm skeptical of anything any large company does, specially specs but its hard to pick any hole in any of these I would say. Adewale also did a excellent job of explaining them and there context for use.

oEmbed – oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Its already being used on Youtube and many others. You request a resource and it gives you back xml or json for the resource instead of returning a nasty piece of html or javascript. Very neat.

Salmon Protocal – Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle So from what I understand, its an attempt to standardise all these commenting systems like cocomment and disqus (which I use on this blog even). They shouldn't really feel threaten because they could support Salmon and add value to the basic concept.

Wave federation protocal – Well this goes without saying but I learned that its now very easy to setup a wave server. So I expect I'll be playing with that soon. There's also a lovely guide to Wave by Gina Trapani which will grow into something much more complete in time.

pubsubhubbub
– A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they're interested in is updated. This is a difficult one to explain but generally its a clever way to poll for updates without polling the server. Instead you submit a request and a status server alerts you to when the change has happened. It sounds complex but its actually not and its quite neat. Like most google things, its worth flicking through the presentations on the site.

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Maybe you need Waver 1.0. Waver is a Adobe Air app which simply takes Google wave in the Webkit browser and stips off all the browser chrome and runs in its own process. I say all this like its necessarily a bad thing. Its not bad, its actually quite snappy compared to running Google Wave in a browser with many other tabs. The only issues is its not really a new client for Google Wave, its more hybrid rip off of the iphone running wave in webkit. Luckily the whole thing is free and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux without too much bother.

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I'm upset to hear storytlr is closing down, but not from lack of interest. I use storytlr to do my lifestreaming on www.ianforrester.org and was thinking about deploying it elsewhere.

we have decided to stop operating Storytlr in 10 weeks, on December 31st 2009. The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don't have time anymore to operate this service properly.

We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

This is why we have also decided to open source the platform. Not today. It will involve first a major refactoring, since at the moment it looks more like a giant spaghetti than an easy to install package. We don't know when it will ready, but we will do our best to do it as soon as possible. Please get in touch if you want to help with this effort.

Open source it great. But my next thoughts are towards my data. Data Portability is always a worry when a service goes away or down. But they have done a excellent job of allowing data download into CSV files plus there will be a Zip file of any binary blobs like mp3's and pictures.

Nows a good time to find an alternative I guess…at least till the open source version is easily deployable. Sweetcron is looking more and more attractive.

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Adobe FXG is so wrong in so many ways, its untrue. When Microsoft decided to do there own xml vector format I was shaking my head but now Adobe's also doing the same my head is in my hands.

FXG 1.0 describes an XML-based graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform. FXG contains high-level graphical and text primitives that can be used to create, group, transform and visually modify basic vector and bitmap shapes. The FXG rendering model follows very closely the Flash Player 10 rendering model and exposes all graphics capabilities of the Flash platform as well as offering expandable support to accommodate future capabilities of the Flash Player.

When initial work on an XML-based graphics interchange format began, the natural first thought was to use SVG. However, there are key differences between SVG and Flash Player's graphics capabilities. These include core differences in SVG and Flash's rendering model with regards to filters, transforms and text. Additionally, the interchange format needed to be able to support future Flash Player features, which would not necessarily map to SVG features. As such, the decision was made to go with a new interchange format, FXG, instead of having a non-standard implementation of SVG. FXG does borrow from SVG whenever possible.

Aka, we see the need for a xml vector language but svg is already developed and we can't be bothered to change our flash engine to support it. Instead we want to write a spec around our already written code base and make you all adopt it. Well geez thanks Adobe. I really hope no one uses FXG, hopefully the lesson will get back to Adobe that they can't just stick opensource on a manipulated web standard and expect people to use it unless you make them do it in your own proprietary world (*cough* Actionscript). Thank goodness at least Google is backing open standards like SVG.

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Google Wave, is the hottest thing on the web at this current moment. And to be frank marks the start of Google's rise in my estimations and there commitment to the web as the platform. When I first saw the Google IO video was impressed and seeked out my wave invite I would have got if I had gone to the London event. So I've been using/on Google wave for a while now, but since the public beta I've started to really use it for conversations.

So I've noticed Google wave has been getting a bashing from some high profile bloggers in the industry such as Scoble who thinks it will crash on the beach of overhype (what ever that means?). So what do I think? Well I think its amazing and most of my thoughts after watching the video still hold. So I'm going to start with the things I'd like to see changed or I think are not quite right.

Web-like – Wave is on the web but still not part of the web enough. For example why is it I can't send a link to someone directly to a wave or even better using the querystring to a section within a certain wave? Ideally you could do it with Xpointer or Xpath. I know there's wave robots/plugins which can push things out of the wave environment but linking and anchoring should be built in at the basic level.

Groupware – Wave is as far as I can tell a groupware system and although this is great for the enterprise, its also got enough usefulness for much smaller adhoc groups like us arranging events over basecamp, etc. So because of this, it needs plugins for time management, spending, calendaring as soon as possible. Heck I'd like to see a basecamp plugin for Wave but thats for another blog post. I did say ages ago that Lotus, Novell, Microsoft should be worried. There big bulky collaboration systems are under threat by the wave protocal. If they were smart they would quickly launch some skunk work clients or conversion transports using wave. Steve Rubel talks a lot about how Wave doesn't solve a consumer problem and therefore it will die. but I don't it has to, in the same way basecamp doesn't solve a consumer problem. No this is groupware for everyone but someone will adapt it for more clever things.

Client – Wave is crying out for some enterprising developers to create clients for it. I'm not knocking Google's Web Toolkit (GWT), google have done a great job with Google Wave's client but its not quite there yet. Its heavy on my browsers resources. I know there's a version for webkit browsers and the command line, but wheres the XUL, AIR, GTK+, QT heck even a Flash version. The API has been done and theres already reference versions to learn from, so whats taking so long? I can't be the only one thinking this? Anil Dashes excellent blog post talks about the complexity of Wave but never seems to mention how much better wave could be with a different client. Actually this would also solve a lot of the issues Steve Rubel is talking about with Wave.

So i'm still impressed but can't help people are writing it off at the first fence. Give it time to mature and grow before writing it off now. Wave is a hot but not ready for the consumers yet. Oh by the way I've run out of invites sorry.

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Thanks Brendan for the pointer to this post about SVG.

Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.

The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.

Good stuff, I still think SVG is amazing and deserves to be taken seriously. This might be just the boost it needs to move forward and become fruitful. The benefits to google must be quite clear and i'm sure svg will make it into chrome if it doesn't already have it? It would also make sense to include SVG or even SVG tiny into the Android stack too. And lets not forget Google needs to have a answer to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight. Well between SVG, HTML5, JS, CSS and there recent spend on On2's video codecs who knows what could be built.

Ages ago Antoine Quint gave a presentation at Xtech which showed the total stack of Joost's media player application. The stack included SVG, alongside XHTML, CSS, JS, RDF, XUL. The biggest problem they had was with video playback which integrated and was controlable via dom scripting. Well now with that problem almost solved without the aid of Flash/Silverlight. Its should be easy to complete the web stack, and without bigging up Google again, there doing and thinking the right way again.

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I know I've been promising to put my thoughts about google wave up for ages but I wasn't actually sure the EULA allowed public reviews when I was on the sandbox server. However now its somewhat more public, I'm seeing stuff popping up all over the place, so its certainly time to write something. Till then, here's some great use of wave found via a public wave.

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What is Yahoo playing at by adding from yahoo to Flickr? How long till Delicious is also from Yahoo? The weird thing is Upcoming.org isn't from Yahoo, instead it reminds you that this is yahoo.

I noticed Chris Messina did something with his photo around the from yahoo thing, so I quickly did one in Inkscape too. Silly but it gets the point across I think.

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As a lot of people know, I'm not the biggest fan of Apple or what Apple does but I'm happy that the more I look into iTunesLP and iTunes Extras, the more I'm liking it. its seems its all underpined in a new thing called Tunekit, which seems to be related to a new framework which some people are calling Cocoa for the web, SproutCore. So generally its all just HTML, CSS and Javascript. So hopefully if all goes well who know where it might go. It certainly beats some nasty things your seeing on Bluray discs. And even better we're back to the internet has won type territory, aka goodbye to disc technology, good stuff Apple.

I certainly think HTML5, CSS and Javascript on the TV screen is a killer move. I can't even imagine what's possible once Canvas and Canvas3D get mixed up in all this too. Adobe should be worried, their open screen project is interesting but being built around extending Flash is a big mistake. In the same category Silverlight scares most people. Nope HTML is good enough. It certainly seems Apple will lead the pack on this one.

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Dare Obasanjo wrote quite a critical blog post about where RSS readers went wrong, then followed that up with another post about where Friendfeed went wrong.

Dare's thoughts quite solid too,

1. Dave Winer was right about River of News style aggregators. A user interface where I see a stream of news and can click on the bits that interest me without doing a lot of management is superior to the using the current dominant RSS reader paradigm where I need to click on multiple folders, manage read/unread state and wade through massive walls of text I don’t want to read to get to the gems.
2. Today’s RSS readers are a one way tool instead of a two-way tool. One of the things I like about shared links in Twitter & Facebook is that I can start or read a conversation about the story and otherwise give feedback (i.e. “like” or retweet) to the publisher of the news as part of the experience.
3. As Dave McClure once ranted, it's all about the faces. The user interface of RSS readers is sterile and impersonal compared to social sites like Twitter and Facebook because of the lack of pictures/faces of the people whose words you are reading
4. No good ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. As if it isn’t bad enough that you are nagged about having thousands of unread blog posts when you don’t visit your RSS reader for a few days, there isn’t a good way to get an overview of what is most interesting/pressing and then move on by marking everything as read. On the other hand, when I go to Techmeme I can always see what the current top stories are and can even go back to see what was popular on the days I didn’t visit the site.
5. The process of adding feeds still takes too many steps. If I see your Twitter profile and think you’re worth following, I click the “follow” button and I’m done. On the other hand, if I visit your blog there’s a multi-step process involved to adding you to my subscriptions even if I use a web-based RSS aggregator like Google Reader.

I agree, the river of news style aggregator works surprisingly well, I don't know what it is but that movement of scanning a load of headlines is quick and effective. I actually liked RSS Owl's aggregator mode, where you can select a load of feeds and just have them all available in one massive long list. This is great for reading on the train for example.
The social nature of the RSS reader has always been a problem. Not only did I want to share bookmarks via delicious but I also wanted almost equal balance with being able to blog parts of
what I was reading. So in RSS Owl there was the concept of newsbins which you could dump news items into. I wanted those bins to be linked to things like tublr blogs but it wasn't to be. I guess Google readers like feature is as close as I could imagine it would work. However it would be good to make for example public and have a rss feed in the future.

I'm not tied to the look of blogs, its nice but not essential for my reading, although I can see others seeing it as important. The wheat and chaff argument for me wasn't as bad when I was using Touchstone/Particls. It was like having your own Techmeme on your desktop, to be fair also Particls had nicer ways to share news that most rss readers. The APML support and concept was ahead of its time and I'm sure will make it into future rss readers. And finally adding feeds is agreed still too painful, what really does my nut in is when someone links a podcast to the itunes store. So you can't actually get the RSS feed its self. Sometimes I have to pull down the source and search for *.rss or *.xml feeds which is shocking. Discovery should work but it doesn't always and very few seem to cope with multiple feeds.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Liferea with Google Reader sync but I don't bother with folders anymore. I tend to use Liferea when I'm offline to catch up with stuff. My more general use of RSS is as plumbing between components and services, there's no doubt thats what its best for.

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In the New York Times yesterday was a piece about how a certain teenager would text most of the day away but wouldn't use twitter, saying quote I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life. The post goes on about how its not Teenagers driving the usage of Twitter and then starts to look at how the traditional view of early adopters being teenagers is no longer correct.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.

So finally will people stop thinking of early adopters as teenagers? Will the eternal myth that all teenagers are digital native finally go away? I'd certainly like to think so, but I sadly doubt it.

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People have been sending me links to Shareflow and asking what I think of it. Well I did spot it a while ago when the whole thing kicked off about Shareflow ripping off Google Wave.

Let’s suppose that Zenbe HAD copied Google Wave. That would mean that Zenbe managed to design, build and deploy a real, complete, useable product, along with everything needed to actually support a public service, all in less than a month!  That would be phenomenal!   Miraculous! You should check out Shareflow just to see the magic!

If you search the Internet you will realize that Shareflow must be a separate, independent solution, perhaps to a similiar problem, and has nothing to do with Google Wave.

Shareflow grew out of our own efforts at solving our own communication and collaboration needs.  We wanted a something that would let us ditch IM, email, wikis, and other disconnected tools.  We have been working on Shareflow for more than a year, its been out in public since February 09, in private testing for a few  months before that.

You want proof?  How about  a Youtube video from March, or a  blog post from April?  Or this one.  Or just ask anyone who signed up for our subscription service Zenbe Mail earlier this year.

From my point of view I think its like Wave but theres 2 major differences. 1st one is Shareflow is very cloud web 2.0 like, so its a hosted service like 37 Signal's Basecamp. This, a year ago would have been cool and to be honest I'd be saying nicer things about it a year ago too. However Wave has changed things and moved things on for the better. Wave isn't just a application, nor is it just a platform nope its lower down than that. Its a protocal! And its a open protocal, which is a whole different ball park. Actually if I was Shareflow/Zenbe I'd personally put Wave protocal support in the roadmap very soon. They would be crazy not to.

The biggest complaint I have about Google Wave's HTML client is it looks like all other google apps, aka not exactly exciting just functional. While the shareflow client looks better designed. And thats where their business model could be. Leave the heavy lifting stuff to the Wave protocal and platform. Focus on the experience of the users. They need to be more like Mozilia (clever client apps which work on open protocals) that Microsoft (end to end solution).

By the way, did anyone notice Shareflow also has no API and no details of the actual protocal being used? It might have the jump on Wave now, but its won't be long before its bypassed and I just can't see how Zeebe will compete unless they jump on the wave platform too.

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Thanks to Dave Crossland for pointing me to Dave Winer's view on the iphone as a developer platform and its problematic app store model.

The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.

I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.

Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is also useless.

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