Four short links: 30 October 2009

Three Minute Theses, Google Wave RPGs, Public Metadata, and The Finitely-Zoomable Natural World

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The3is In Three -- PhD students must explain their thesis topic in three minutes and one Powerpoint slide. Winner had written on the last words of Shakespearean characters as they met unlikely ends. No video alas, but what a great idea for an Ignite! (via sciblogs)
2. Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) -- gamers using Wave to play RPGs. This can't be the killer app, however, because it is not pornographic. (via BoingBoing)
3. Metadata is Public Record (ArsTechnica) -- Arizone State Supreme Court rules that metadata on the public record is itself in the public record. The test case was a cop who suspected his performance reports had been created when he asked for them and then backdated. His employer had argued the inode info wasn't part of the public record, even though his report was. Sanity prevailed. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
4. Cell Size and Scale -- sweet zoomable interface to show the different relationships in size between everything from Times Regular 12pt to a Carbon atom (via salt, E. coli, hemoglobin, etc.). (via Tom Carden on Delicious)

Four short links: 16 October 2009

Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand)
2. San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions based on real-time city transport feeds; and EcoFinder, which points you to the nearest recycling site for a given item.
3. Google Wave's Best Use Cases (Lifehacker) -- not cases where people are using Wave, but where they want to. Read this as "the Web has not provided all the tools to solve these problems". Something will solve them, and Wave is trying to. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop -- case study from the Cloudera blog. Performs alignment and genotyping on the 100GB of data you get when you sequence a human's genome in about three hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon’s EC2. (via mndoci on Twitter)

Four short links: 7 September 2009

XMPP, Future of Web Frameworks, Infrastructure Stories, Better Email Client

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. App Engine Now Supports XMPP (Jabber) -- messaging servers, whether XMPP or PubSubHubBub, are becoming an increasingly important way to loosely join the small pieces. Google's incorporation of XMPP into GAE reflects this (and the fact that Wave is built on XMPP). (via StPeter on Twitter)
2. Snakes on the Web (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- The best way to predict the future of web development, I think, is to keep asking ourselves the question that led to all the past advances: what sucks, and how can we fix it? So: what sucks about web development? An excellent and thought-provoking talk about the possible directions for improvement in web framework design.
3. Ravelry (Tim Bray) -- We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day. We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX. [...] We have 7 servers running Gentoo Linux and virtualized into a total of 13 virtual servers with Xen. [...]". Interesting technical and business discussion with an unexpected busy site.
4. So's Your Facet: Faceted Global Search for Mozilla Thunderbird -- email clients are LONG overdue for improvement. Encouraging to see an active and open research project to improve it from the folks at Mozilla Messaging.

Four short links: 28 July 2009

UI Library, 3rd Party Wave Server, Mobile Phones + Parasites, Single API to Cloud Providers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. CNMAT Resource Library -- The CNMAT Resource Library is our fast growing collection of materials, sensors, gestural controllers, interface devices, tools, demos, prototypes and products - all organized and annotated to support the design of physical interaction systems, "new lutherie" and art installations. (via egoodman on Delicious)
2. PyGoWave Server -- first third-party Google Wave server, based on Django.
3. Mobile Phones Identify Parasites and Bacteria -- UCB Researchers developed a cell phone microscope, or CellScope, that not only takes color images of malaria parasites, but of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.. The sensor network is built out, and the computers in our pockets surprise us with their uses. (via BoingBoing)
4. libcloud -- a unified interface to cloud providers, written in Python and open source. Covers EC2, EC2-EU, Slicehost, Rackspace, Linode, VPS.net, GoGrid, flexiscale, Eucalyptus. (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 23 July 2009

Wave Fed, Fake Steve, Vanish and Reconnoiter

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Google Wave Federation Protocol -- the interesting part of Wave for me is the system for keeping databases coherent. There's a reference implementationl.
2. I shouldn't have yelled at that Chinese guy so much -- the post that redeemed Fake Steve Jobs in my eyes. We all know that there's no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we're paying for them. There's no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don't be confused -- what we're talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to "fix things in China," well, it's gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it's all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can't even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
3. Vanish -- time-limited encryption in a Firefox plugin.
4. Reconnoiter -- holy cow web console and analytics for data centers, from the magic Theo Schlossnagle. He built the screenshots for his OSCON presentation, graphing streams of live performance data from dozens of data centers, while on a Virgin America flight.

The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 7

“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead

The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing.  It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management.

In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it gave rise to the urban legend that Microsoft’s Bill Gates even once sagely noted that “640K (of program memory) ought to be enough for everyone.” (the story is likely apocryphal);

Windows, in turn, gave rise to another computing form, one that was ubiquitous, almost to the point of homogeneity; it was also graphical and added connectivity to the mix, a trend that Microsoft was able to leverage into near-total hegemony during the first decade of the Internet Age.

Now, all of this is giving rise to another era, the age of Mobile Broadband, best exemplified by the iPhone, the first caveat-free mobile platform.

In two short years, the iPhone has enveloped the planet, with a 77 country global footprint, a 40M iPhone/iPod touch user base, 65K apps rolled out, those same apps downloaded 1.5B times and a 100K developer ecosystem.

This got me thinking about Carver Mead’s mantra. If DOS had one form of “native” application, and Windows had another, what then are the cornerstones of a native mobile broadband app?

Put another way; before iPhone, the industry answer to the mobile question was more akin to coaxing a dog to walk on its hind legs than watching a bird fly.  In other words, more hack and parlor trick than true dharma.

The Message is the Medium

Forty years ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserted that the “medium is the message,” as a way of underscoring how different forms of media are imbued with their own contextual forms of meaning.

Yet, as we sit at the waking hours of the Mobile Broadband Era, it is hard not to conclude that it is The Message that is to be the defining characteristic of this era.

Why, The Message?  Simply put, messages have compelling attributes.  One, they can be date stamped and packaged up to elegantly deal with both real-time and asynchronous communication scenarios.

Two, messages can be transported on a one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine basis (e.g., device to server, device to device), facilitating a wide variety of unidirectional, multidirectional, manual, automated and programmatic communication flows.

Three, as Twitter’s simple “140 characters meets open API” model suggests, a message can simultaneously be simple (it doesn’t get much simpler than 140 characters) AND support rich payloads, auto-generate events, catalyze discussion threads, and be designed to make creating derivatives easy, all the while supporting the exposition, partitioning and instantiation of all sorts of Client, Server and Service application hybrids.

That’s why it’s “interesting” that when Google announced Wave, its open source, open protocol messaging platform, the blogosphere’s response ranged from applause to derision and confusion.

In part, this is understandable, inasmuch as Wave represents an evolved sense of what real-time communication flows look like, and sometimes, the most game-changing ideas take a while to germinate (let alone actually execute the value proposition).

Hence, it’s reasonable to expect that they will initially be met with a shrug.

At its core, though, I think that Google is solving the right problem by focusing on messaging, and would suggest that the most basic thing that they can do relative to making Wave a success is to eat their own dog food by writing and exposing wrappers to all of their services directly within Wave.

At its most basic, Wave begs the question of why can't Mail, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, News, Feeds, Documents and Blogger be better integrated within Google?

But beyond that, if Google is serious about Wave they should enable developers (and meta developers – e.g., the former Visual Basic crowd) to build their own Wave apps by compositing Google service functions through one simplified wizard-like interface.

Similarly, Google should take what they have done with shortcuts in Gmail, and expand it to their other products so that users have a palette of simplified scripts that they can call upon in a context-aware fashion with little technical know how (i.e., what can be called in Maps may be different than Gmail or News for that matter).

Then, Google can focus on providing the best client, service, media, search, analytics and developer tools for Wave on a number of platforms, an approach which is congruent with supporting Chrome and Android, while remaining open to iPhone, Windows, the Mac, etc.

And of course, a whole ecosystem of data feed services, tool builders and service providers can piggyback on all of this goodness.

Information Mobility is Superconductivity

Like many people, I am a member of multiple social (Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and affiliated interest networks (favorite blogs), places where I cultivate my online persona, build a profile, upload content, participate in conversations and manage my connections with friends, followers and the like.

In the old days, I had to create my identity over and over, upload the same content repeatedly and perform unnatural acts to cobble together the sum total of my online efforts in some meaningful way.

But, thanks to services like Facebook Connect, Twitter API, OpenSocial, and “embeddable” flash widgets, I can create, converge and connect locally, but share that same information globally with minimal (or, much less) effort.

This is the power of information mobility, the premise that a user’s online actions, from login and session instantiation to status updating, profile exchange, photo posting, tweets, comments, movies/music buying/watching/rating can be spread liberally across all of their devices, networks and runtime spaces.

It’s about command, control and orchestration of the online “Me,” a domain which touches realms like publishing, distribution, information management, and privacy.

This is why information mobility, when it really kicks in (i.e., is on the right side of S-curve), becomes a self-affirming engine of systemic growth.

Cloud-ification is Upon Us

When mobile broadband is stripped to its core, you are really left with two underlying constructs.  One is the premise of being able to access your media, information and apps anytime, anywhere, and two is the precept that you need fast, perpetual connectivity to make the user experience reliable and robust enough to become mission critical.

This is the domain of cloud computing, a mode whereby software, hardware and service layers are loosely coupled enough that the data, logic and presentation elements of an application can be partitioned (as needed) between local and remote instances.

In essence, when applications are cloud-ified, they gain persistency, federation and derivation capabilities, enabling the same core to be assembled in a way that addresses the needs of specific runtime scenarios, device environments and scaling requirements.

As such, cloud-ified apps become liberated from a single instance or a single client application, enabling all sorts of interesting composite applications to promulgate.

That is why the same Twitter tweet can be presented so dramatically different in a desktop Twitter dashboard application, like TweetDeck, the Twitter.com website and the Tweetie iPhone client.

Similarly, it is the reason a website like StockTwits, which is built on top of the Twitter ecosystem, can simultaneously parse specific tweets pertaining to a particular stock or between members of a given investing circle, and a StockTwits-aware client app, like the afore-mentioned TweetDeck, can automatically create a filtered view of that same data.

In fact, Apple’s rise to it’s current lofty place can be traced to a decision to embrace cloud computing by tightly coupling iTunes (which has a service tier, desktop tier and device runtime tier) first to the iPod, and then to the iPhone (and the iPod touch).

The breakout success of App Store is a by-product of embracing and extending this same model by overlaying interfaces for developers and applications.

Finally, MobileMe takes this same computing model and applies it to a user’s personal data, backing it up, synchronizing it between devices and making it universally available across those same devices via a Web client, a native Mac/Windows client and, you guessed it, a native iPhone/iPod touch client.

But, to be clear, while Apple is the current patron saint of this model at work, we are at the beginning of this wave, not at the end game stage. Apple will not run the table.

Net It Out for Me

I am really bullish on the potential to create new, highly innovative user experiences that are fully native to the Mobile Broadband Era. 

They will be message-aware, information and media rich, mobility premised, and optimized to a specific application, service and/or device.

This is the next wave in its purest form.

Related Posts:

1. Envisioning the Social Map-lication
2. The Nine Essential Truths of Entrepreneurial Success
3. Right Here Now Services: Weaving a Real Time Web Around Status
4. Digital Media Rules: The Open Sourcing of Information
5. Surplus, Scarcity and the iPhone App Store

Four short links: 4 June 2009

Google Wave, Education, Intelligence, and Twitterspawn

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Wave Robot Ruby Client -- Sam Ruby ported the Wave Robot Python Client library to Ruby. He found that the wire protocol is full of Java classnames, and says, Overall, I feel that this Google Wave could benefit from earlier and wider reviews. In the comments, a Google employee replies The Java API was implemented first... We are working on de-Java-fying the wire protocol and making the python robot client library more “pythonic”.. Lovely to see Google actively cocreating with the wider web world, because the alternative (the old-school "we know better, use my sacred code you unworthy mortal" arrogance) does not lead to successful web-wide technology.
2. How Do I Remediate THAT? -- my favourite blogging teacher observes that his remedial math class don't engage as much, even with the fun videos he plays to start discussions. The comments are fascinating, and point to gems like the following:
3. Describing the Habits of Mind -- the habits that humans exhibit when they behave intelligently. E.g., Managing Impulsivity. Goal-directed, self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act. [...] They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information, taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and listening to alternative points of view. Often, students blurt out the first answer that comes to mind. Sometimes they shout an answer, start to work without fully understanding the directions, lack an organized plan or strategy for approaching a problem, or make immediate value judgments about an idea (criticizing or praising it) before they fully understand it. They may take the first suggestion given or operate on the first idea that comes to mind rather than consider alternatives and the consequences of several possible directions. Research demonstrates, however, that less impulsive, self-disciplined students are more successful.
4. The Spawn of Twitter Data (Jess3 + Brian Solis) -- visually-pleasing graphic of the different services and application areas built around the use of Twitter data. (via Flowing Data)

Gazing Into Twitterverse

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 80

Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.

Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, "We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"

That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It's perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google's Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That's the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.

In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.

It turns out that Jens had the idea back in 2004, when Google first acquired the company that became Google Maps. As Lars tells the story:

We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point....

We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

Responding in Context

Let's say I want to communicate with someone. I start a wave, just as I might start an email message. The recipient(s) see an incoming wave, just as they see an email today. Where the magic starts is with replies. In email, you have the choice of including no context, only a portion of the message you're replying to, or the whole thing. In the first case, you need to go back to the original message for context; in the second, you have wasted copies going back and forth. Come into the middle of a long thread and you may be replying to a discussion that has already moved on or covered the point you want to express. But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context.

As you can see in the screenshot below (click to enlarge), a Wave inbox looks much like an email inbox. But look to the right, and you can see how the replies are embedded right into the middle of the original message, so Stephanie's question about what camera Jens used for his photos appears right in context.

Now, you might ask how well this works for long, complex messages rather than the short one shown in the demo. I don't know the answer, but I suspect that Wave will be even stronger in that case. Our experience with collaborative editing of book manuscripts at O'Reilly suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.

Is it a particle or a wave? It's both.

First generation email/IM integration let you see when someone was online, and opt to instant message someone rather than send them an email. Wave simply erases the distinction.

If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit. "In our experience, a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press 'Done'," says Lars. (However, it is possible to set Wave to hold your messages till you are done.)

A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave.

The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.

Step by step playback draws a cheer

Let's say you are added to a conversation (a wave) that has been going on for a long time? You can be added at any relevant point, not just the end. But even cooler, you can do a playback of the entire evolution of the conversation.

But wait: there's more! Let's say you want to edit your message (or even a message that was written by another participant in the wave). Yes, you can. The original author is notified, but every participant can see that the message has been modified, and if they want, can replay the changes.

This leads to a change in behavior: conversations become shared documents. The screenshot below shows a simple example, as Gregory and Casey collaborate to produce a good answer to Dan's question. As Stephanie Hannon, the product manager for Googe Wave, said to me, "In Wave, you don't have to make the choice between discussing and collaborating."

As anyone who's used version control knows, a document with lots of discussion and edits can become pretty messy. No problem. You can export an edited wave as a new wave, and start over. "One of our design principles," says Lars, "is that the product of a wave can be as important as the original wave."

Nor do you need to include everyone in every part of a conversation. Essentially, Lars, says, "waves are tree-shaped sets of messages. You can shape a subtree, or a sub-conversation and limit the set of participants in any way you like."

(continue reading)