Page 2 of 72, covering posts published from December 2007 to January 2009.
Facebook filed eight legal complaints in United States federal court against Power Ventures, operators of social aggregator Power.com. Facebook claims Power collected Facebook usernames and passwords, stored Facebook data on their servers, used the Facebook trademark without license, sent e-mails posing as Facebook, and knowingly circumvented Facebook's attempts to block access.
Content developed exclusively for the iPhone helped web publishers rethink content display beyond the desktop browser. Reimagining web content for small screens with bandwidth, latency, and interaction constraints provided publishers with an introduction to widget concepts and a broader web strategy. iPhone OS 2.0 ignited new mobile development in 2008, which should carry over to new platforms in 2009.
Over the past few months the OpenSocial spec has grown to include JSON, Atom, and XML outputs over a RESTful interface. In this blog post I will provide a brief overview of OpenSocial RESTful protocols and its data implementation for any website interested in standardized descriptors of social data.
Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development. TwitterFE.com is a fully-functional read-only clone of Twitter.com designed to make your web browser sing. I created the site as an example of web development best practices anyone can integrate into their web presence.
Today's publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven't gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.
On Tuesday Yahoo! launched its Open Strategy, exposing Yahoo! account data and social connections to third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is the third pillar of faith announced by CEO Jerry Yang last year during the company's rebirth. Y!OS is the new glue connecting the next versions of Yahoo!'s own properties and will eventually power more relevant advertising across the network. In this post I will provide an overview of the new Yahoo! services and its impact on both Yahoo! and third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is one of the keynote presentations at Widget Summit next week.
Every day our web applications ignore useful visitor data. We respond to single request based on a domain and a path without listening to the capabilities, location, preferences, and favorite interactions of our visitors and their requesting agent. A few weeks ago I challenged a room full of designers at PARC to rethink what's possible on the Web and rely on adaptive programming techniques to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time. I titled the 50-minute talk "Better Design Through Code" and walk through latent capabilities of servers and browsers ready and waiting to deliver personalized, adaptive content to unique Web visitors.
Apple's relative secrecy regarding the iPhone platform and distribution policies have caused market uncertainties in need of some further clarity. In this post I will examine the iPhone OS 2.0 platform and the iPhone App Store from the point of view of Apple and other hosted storefront providers.
Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it's possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox's core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.
Microsoft has extended the OpenSearch protocol with a new search suggestions data formats expressed XML or JSON. The new format will display real-time search results, summaries, images, and even search result classifications inside the browser chrome for any site owner supplying the appropriate format. In this post I'll teach you how to add search suggestions to your OpenSearch description document for instant search suggestions in IE8.
The Internet is coming to your TV, reclaiming your split attention span from the other gadgets around the house. Intel announced its latest effort to power your living room yesterday with new media processors, reference designs, and software stacks that may eventually find their way into the cable boxes, Blu-ray players, and home media centers of 2010. Intel partnered with Yahoo! to deliver Internet-connected widgets, advertising, and content to potential partners with a software stack branded The Widget Channel. What new opportunities are available inside the Widget Channel platform? When is the right time to implement?
On June 30 Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo! to better index SWF content on the Web. Search engines can now look inside the binary SWF format to extract text, links, and possible actions. In this post I will take a deeper look at search engine Flash interpreters and provide a few tips for successful indexing.
I have learned a few App Engine best practices over over the past month and would like to share some best practices for App Engine development gained mostly through trial and error. In this post I will share data optimization tips for Google's hosted Bigtable instance, reduce the errors and resource usage of your application, and add a few steps to your deployment checklist.
I am hosting a my third annual Widget Summit conference November 3rd and 4th at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.
Over the past few weeks new conversations have emerged regarding how conferences must change to better suit their audience. As a conference producer, conference speaker, and attendee I have many opinions on running a great show but today's post will focus on speakers. In this post I will share three speaking tips that keep coming up in my conversations with other speakers in the industry.
Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications. In this post I will summarize Google App Engine from a developer's point of view, outline its major features, and examine pitfalls for developers and startups interested in deploying web applications on Google's servers.
The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! just released a detailed performance analysis of web applications on the iPhone. Yahoo! analyzed the full capabilities of the iPhone's Safari browser including browser cache and transfer speeds. The iPhone cache is much smaller than a desktop browser, and web developers should adjust their targets accordingly.
The social web has filled our websites with too much third-party clutter as we figure out the best way to integrate content with the favorite sites and preferences of our visitors. Intelligent websites should tune-in to the content preferences of their visitors, tailoring a specific experience based on each visitor's favorite sites and services across the social web. In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove of personalization data sitting inside your visitor's browser history for deep personalization experiences.
Data portability is only useful if outside systems can comprehend the exported data. Well-described and interoperable data sets open new possibilities for context-aware social applications, importing your friends, photos, or genetic markup from an existing system into your current tool of choice. In this post I will discuss website best practices for exporting portable, descriptive data sets in the name of data portability.
In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.
Google released a new version of its Google Analytics tracking code last month. In this post you will learn about the new features available to webmasters and how to move away from the deprecated libraries.
NewsGator is giving away desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox as part of a new plan to capture more enterprise revenue.
Google is currently processing over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its computing clusters.
I am once again organizing a dinner gathering during the Macworld conference for Mac small business owners and developers. This year's MacSB Macworld dinner will take place on Tuesday, January 15 starting at 6 p.m. at Chaat Cafe.
Facebook is proactively deleting Pages and other content from its site in an attempt to limit fake listings created by unauthorized entities. The new enforcement procedures started on Thursday night with many Facebook users receiving notifications of their deleted pages and an apparent violation of the Facebook Pages Terms of Service.