Blog – Page 22 – Niall Kennedy

Windows Live Spaces launches

Windows Live Spaces has just launched, tying new social networking features into the blogging service. The new release features an integrated friends module tied into your contacts defined in Messenger and elsewhere, and adds new customization options using Microsoft Gadgets.

The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that contact’s mini-profile (contact card) within Messenger.

Spaces users can add the same Microsoft Gadgets written for their desktop or personal start page to their blog sidebar. If you are a Sudoku fan you might add a Sudoku puzzle or two to your sidebar and let your friends compete with you for high scores. I think the broad reach of gadgets across multiple uses could turn up some compelling content for Spaces users.

The Spaces homepage is now a lot less ugly than before too. They still have the very Ubuntu-like image of three people holding hands (contrasted above), but it’s now in 3-D.

I think products such as Messenger will continue to be especially popular among users who enjoy a suite of tools. Combine Spaces, Messenger, Hotmail, and Zune, and many users are happy it all works well together. I’m sure more Windows Live products will be integrated with Spaces as they launch, creating new reasons for the personal profile pages to act as hubs of online activity.

Hopefully this is the last time for a while feed aggregator users are reminded just how often the same Spaces content changes its GUID. If you opened your aggregator this evening to find many new and unread items from your Spaces feed, it’s the URL changing again.

The official Spaces blog has the official announcement or you can browse some of the new features on the Discover Spaces site

Flash 9 and the MySpace effect

Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at Adobe, to learn more about the changes in Flash 9 and its effect on the Flash and MySpace ecosystem.

Background

The Flash browser plugin has been a huge success on new web communities with its ubiquity across PCs and its efficient bundled audio and video codecs. Research firm NPD found the Flash Player installed on almost 98% of desktops in April, including a 70% penetration for then 7-month-old version 8. Flash is used on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, and Photobucket to display rich content on-side or through embeddable widgets added to any web page. The embedded Flash widgets have become popular additions to configurable sites such as MySpace, allowing users to add their favorite video clips, images, or music tracks anywhere they imagine.

Open, yet more secure

Flash 9 adds new options for site owners allowing more control over the embedded content present on their pages. The allowNetworking and allowScriptAccess property tags can be added to HTML markup describing a Flash file to restrict the virtual machine’s permission set within your pages. Emmy mentioned the extra parameters allow websites to “safely provide a controlled embed environment with decreased opportunity for abuse and control.” Without such restrictions it is possible for a Flash widget to take control of the browser window and navigation, open pop-up windows, and other unwanted behavior.

Emmy confirmed MySpace had contacted Adobe about better ways to secure Flash content embedded on their pages and the two companies worked together on an escalated solution included in Flash 9. MySpace began testing the new Flash features two weeks after launch and made the complete switch about 3 weeks after the launch of Flash 9.

What changed?

MySpace restricts the behavior of Flash embeds, limiting their ability to call external links or URLs by setting allowNetworking to internal. The files can display pictures and videos, but cannot add clickable external links to their Flash files. Flickr can display a slideshow of your latest photographs, but clicking an individual photo will not launch the destination page.

Widget producers need to rethink their embedded content strategy, adding new actionable items to their HTML snippets. You can add a clickable image inside the object or add new lines to the snippet with links back to the full web page.

Conclusion

Web sites allowing users to insert arbitrary HTML should take a look at the new security restrictions in Flash 9 to limit the actions of such content on site visitors. Flash producers relying on large embedded install bases such as MySpace need to rethink the monetization of those eyeballs, as users are no longer able to visit your full page through on a 425×350 pixel link target at the end of an embedded video.

Flash 9 does not currently have the widespread adoption allowing new embeddable objects to be coded in only ActionScript 3.0, so it does not make sense to code a SWF directly for the version 9 player at this point. MySpace may speed the adoption of version 9, and version 8 was able to capture 70% of the install base within 7 months, but the new player is currently limited to Windows and PPC Macs only. An Intel Mac version of Flash 9 is currently in beta and a Linux version is not due out until next year “early 2007” according to Emmy. Site owners could sniff the Flash version of their visitors using JavaScript, creating a profile for future embed deployment.

You can read more about the Flash 9 security measures in Adobe’s white paper.

Google launches open source project hosting

Google has just launched project hosting inside of its Google Code effort. The Google Code Project Hosting center allows any developer to create and host a new project powered by Google management and hosting tools.

The new service features a reworked backend for Subversion built on top of Google’s Big Table file system. The robustness of Google’s backend will power the code repository.

The site features a new issue-tracking system utilizing AJAX techniques for quick and responsive feedback for its users. The issue-tracking interface is similar to Gmail’s table layout, and allows customization through open tag fields.

Developers on the site are required to have a Google Mail account but there is no approval process for new projects. Subversion repositories are limited to 100 MB in size.

Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row.

Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new interaction models place increased importance on your server’s ability to respond quickly and frequently to requests, allowing your web app to feel like a desktop app. Rasmus walked through each of the essential components of a rich web app, optimizing each step along the way with the goal of supporting 500,000 users and their 1700 requests/second as seamlessly as possible with less hardware.

Once your web application in complete Rasmus recommends using http_load to evaluate your application performance. How many requests per second can you handle? What is the latency of these requests? Your choices will reflect your app‘s ability to scale.

Once you’ve grabbed some statistics it’s time to dig a bit deeper and understand which processes are responsible for the slowdown. Valgrind is an emulation tool allowing you to step through your Apache server, Zend components, and PHP wrappers to determine the pain-points in your application. You may notice unexpected processes firing off such as SSL for local database connections that are unnecessarily weighing down your app. KCachegrind is useful for visualizing these processes.

Prepared statements can be a bit slow in PHP and skip the query cache. Rasmus recommends using PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES in PHP 5 for more optimal data access.

APC is an alternative cache allowing for better query execution. Note: include_once and require_once don’t play nice with opcode caches right now and changing to require. This behavior should be fixed in future versions of APC. APC has a no-stat mode and if you give it absolute paths you can skip the stat() call.You can also store PHP variables in shared memory such as your config.ini file.

PHP 5 adds better XML based on libxml2. SimpleXML is a good tool to load a full XML file and map elements. PHP 5 contains a new SOAP extension written in C and will have an Axis-based version available in a few months.

I may up a full transcript of the talk, but until then you can walk through the slides from Rasmus’s talk.

OpenDarwin shutting down

Mac OS X open-source community site OpenDarwin announced it will shut down in the next couple months. The site was the center of discussion and development of WebKit (the code behind Apple’s Safari browser and Nokia’s Series 60 browser), DarwinPorts, and other projects.

It’s too bad the projects will now all disperse, and I can’t help but wonder if the move was influenced by something to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in a few weeks.

Technorati redesigns for the MySpace crowd

Summer is here, meaning it must be time for a new site design from Technorati.

The four major Technorati redesigns have each tried to welcome a different type of crowd to the site without alienating existing users. When the site went online in November 2002 the target audience was alpha-bloggers and Linux Journal readers. The company was incorporated in May 2003 and saw its first big redesign in the summer of 2004 focused on the new users visiting the site for real-time information in the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In 2005 the site redesigned again, aiming for a more mainstream audience and better organization of new features such as keyword search and tags.

The MySpace demographic is now makes up 30% or more of Technorati’s user base and the new site design seems to be aimed at a younger crowd with its candy colors and increased use of icons and small images.

Unlike many other search sites Technorati’s link structure seems designed to keep people within its pages. A linked blog post title on the site homepage points to a URL search result and not the author’s original entry for example. Tag pages are no longer a snapshot of multiple sources across the web such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Furl, placing Flickr results behind a tab.

I like the breadcrumbs at the top of each search result page and the inclusion of tool pages in the footer. The redesigned “Discover” pages look nice, except for the pixelated feed icon in the title bars.

The big problem for Technorati and many other sites is trying to help users consume the vast amount of choices and information available. When Technorati had fewer features it was easy enough to highlight each option and the latest data on the front page of the site. As the number of data exploration options on the site increases I expect more interface tweaks to help users make sense of it all. Hopefully Technorati will take some ideas from the new Yahoo! homepage and shuffle personalization and section highlighting across the site based on usage statistics.

NY Times on Google’s lack of focus

Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google’s current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it’s a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products.

Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo! is now too bureaucratic for someone to come up with a game-changing idea and run with it.

My favorite stat: “[O]ver the last year, according to comScore, Yahoo added 11.8 million e-mail users, more than Gmail’s entire user base.”

International search landscape

DeWitt and I were chatting over breakfast yesterday about the future of search. What will be the big changes in search over the next 5 years? What are the growth markets in terms of index size, users, repeat visits, and new interfaces? The first thing that popped to mind was the international landscape of the Internet and the always-on world wide web taking hold in developing nations.

According to comScore numbers from May, 14% of the world’s total population age 15 or older are online. Bump that number up a bit if you include Internet cafes and mobile phones, a popular way to get online in China or India. The United States currently has the largest online population it only represents 22% of the measured world total. Search indices, users, content, and companies vary in each country, leaving a lot of room for growth by international players.

United States search engine market share

Google currently dominates the search market in the United States and western Europe with 46% market share in the U.S. and a 80% share in France. Google’s dominance in France has caused some concern for local business as the company feels over-reliant on a foreign company. (U.S. source, French source)

Yahoo! is the strongest international player in Asia through partnerships with Softbank in Japan and Alibaba in China. These two markets have a strong sense of national pride and a resistance to outsiders. Independent search engine Baidu commands 44% of the Chinese search market according to Analysis International and regularly criticizes its American competitors as bad for China and incapable of indexing their language.

A few of the big search companies could have some trouble with non-Latin languages and sentence structure as Baidu suggests.

Other languages have proven an even tougher market to crack. Yandex is the market leader in Russia with 60% of the market (according to LiveInternet (via Yandex marketing), followed by Rambler at 20% and Google in third place. Note the big weekend dip from Yandex above compared to relatively smaller dips from its competitors.

Each country searches content a bit differently. Korean search engines such as Naver are heavy with user-contributed content such as questions and answers. A large population in China searches with a cell phone in one hand a cell phone in the other. Japan loves 2-dimensional bar codes bridging the physical world with the Web through their camera phones. Europe loves to SMS.

The big four search companies of the world are all located on the west coast of the United States, but the technologies they must adapt and deploy differ with each country and user demographic. The search world is not flat and big companies must continue to tailor their indices, front-end, and content gathering systems for each market. New content sources might spring up in the form of instant messaging, such as Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996 or consumer to consumer search from Korean company Naver and be repackaged by large international companies such as AOL and Yahoo! respectively. The biggest opportunity costs that may be possibly lost result from an insular view of the Web, content, and search, and I hope the search industry is smart enough to latch on to the best ideas from around the world and deliver great services to each population.

Zune blogs powered by TypePad

The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart’s TypePad blogging software. That’s Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL.

Microsoft is heavily into “dogfooding” everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It’s good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path.

Google Base search adds RSS

Google Base now provides an RSS feed for its search results. Every search contains a link to the RSS feed and a feed icon on the top right portion of the page. A search for Pearl Jam is a good example. (via Search Engine Watch)

I’m surprised the results are provided in RSS and not Atom, as Google seems to prefer the later. It’s good that Google added the feed icon as well, drawing attention to the link.