Social computing has changed the way we interact with the Web. Our information consumption and production benefits from the participation of the crowd in its various forms, creating niche audiences and new types of curators independent of space and time. We're connected to local experts on hiking, cooking, parenting, programming, and much more. Yet social media extends beyond the realm of content creators, bolstered by the comments, ratings, rankings, sharing, and reading masses that help us find the content we seek. Forrester Research released a report last week, Social Technographics, detailing levels of social media participation among 10,000 adults and…
Rich Internet applications are stepping out of the web browser and onto the desktop, helped along by a new set of toolkits. Web developers are able to code against desktop resources using familiar languages and toolkits such as JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, or HTTP interactions. Offline access for web applications is about much more than planes, trains, and automobiles — it can accelerate performance and integrate with established desktop interactions as well. Offline web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. In this week's podcast I step beyond the myths of offline web applications with special guest Brad Neuberg….
Widgets are coming to Series 60 handsets this Fall, bringing tiny pieces of content onto the application menu of the world's best-selling smartphone OS. The S60 Web Run-Time builds upon the existing open source technologies in the S60 browser and provides a development experience very close to Apple's Dashboard widget environment. The widget software will be available in version 3.2 of Nokia's operating system due out this Fall. The Series 60 operating system is currently installed on over 85 million mobile devices produced by Lenovo, LG, Nokia, and Samsung. S60 widgets are marked up using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google's geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products. I've been hoping for such an API since I first deconstructed the Google Reader backend in December 2005. Most users will likely interact with the Google AJAX Feed API through a JavaScript library included on their site or a pre-configured badge generated on the Google site. The Feed API wrapper is part of a larger effort by Google to extend its search…
The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I'm leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I'll be in attendance all three days if you'd like to say hello. Intermediate to Advanced Syndication Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic…
The Google gadget ecosystem received 960 million pagevieiws last week, a 36% jump from numbers reported by the search giant just one month ago. Users are adding themes, videos, games, and even a few productivity tools to their personalized homepages and blog sidebars, creating new content for fun and business. In this post I'll provide some new statistics about Google gadget growth over the past month, building upon my larger statistical overview of Google Gadgets in early March. March saw the rebirth of two widget brands, and spring cleaning on a few others. On March 8 Yahoo! launched a major…
Last week I started a new weekly podcast covering news and trends in the web technology industry. I plan to sit down with different newsmakers and experts each week to examine the changing state of web technology and hopefully capture a snapshot of how this changing world affects our lives and livelihood. Niall Kennedy's Podcast is a bit like an extended conversation on the topics I like to cover on Niall Kennedy's Weblog. I'll post short summaries to my blog for each new episode, but if you're interested in full write-ups and enclosures you should subscribe to the podcast feed….
Adobe released early bits of its next big product bet on Monday morning, a web and desktop hybrid code-named Apollo. Apollo is the first child born out of the Adobe-Macromedia merger of April 2005, bringing together the desktop strength of Adobe PDF combined Macromedia's web-savvy Flash and Apple's web browser engine. Apollo will continue to receive heavy marketing from Adobe building towards a 1.0 launch in the fall. In this post I'll break down the components of Adobe's Apollo framework, identify opportunities for application development, and compare the promised features against other software offerings. What is Apollo? Apollo combines…
This month's CSO Magazine features an interview with MySpace security czar Hemanshu Nigam. The article discusses the wealth of available information about the site's 150 million members for both good and bad purposes, and ways MySpace is working to clean up and protect its community and brand. Parent company News Corp. wants to create a safe community attractive to new users and advertisers, yet MySpace members are so active and so varied it's not always an easy task. Nigam formerly worked for heavy-handed intellectual property enforcers Microsoft and the MPAA. Interesting excerpts No senior citizens MySpace members can no longer…
Ask.com's local search product AskCity launched new tools last night that allow searchers to define the scope of a search by drawing on a map. Ask has always been focused on liberal search queries you might ask a concierge and this new search feature again puts the user in charge while abstracting some complexities of local search. In my example search above I searched for coffee near The Palace Hotel, a popular web conference spot. A search for the hotel put a marker in the middle of Market Street, but it didn't matter in the case of my search. I…
Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday's post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I'll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google…
Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I'll share…
Last Friday I visited Six Apart's headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart's four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…
Netvibes announced a "Universal Widget API" at last week's Future of Web Apps conference in London, promising a write-once run anywhere widget environment using an open-source widget runtime. The new widget system encourages publishers to author widgets using the Netvibes API and extend the reach of their content beyond the Netvibes user base through an adaptable wrapper. In this post I'll walk through some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher's point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments. Manifests Inline…
Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo's optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers. Many websites utilize common libraries for JavaScript development, creating a drop-down menu, file retrieval, or chart rendering using a library such as Prototype, script.aculo.us, dojo, and many others. If five Ruby on Rails sites utilize the same script.aculo.us library for effects you'll have to…
Google will host a conference this summer focused on building scalable websites. The one-day conference takes place on Saturday, June 23, at the Google offices in Seattle, home to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Talk, and a few other teams. The conference organizers are currently accepting applications for 45-minute talks, and hopefully we'll be able to learn a little more about concepts behind MapReduce, Bigtable and some large-scale data management issues from the Google staff. Registration is not yet open, and it's unclear whether the conference will be held in the downtown sales office or the engineering office in Kirkland, so…
Nokia announced a new mobile feed reader focused on video today at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. The Nokia Video Center comes pre-installed on new Nokia Series 60 devices such as the newly announced N95 and N93i but is also available as a separate download for compatible devices. You can load videos onto the phone through your home computer or receive updates over-the-air at HSDPA speeds or using open WiFi while you're on the go. The Video Center software supports H.264 videos, meaning videobloggers have even more reasons to create specially formatted and mini-sized (320×240) versions of their show…
A French security blogger gained access to private user data on personal homepage service Netvibes last weekend, exposing stored usernames and passwords for popular integrated web services as well as user content loaded in the page. The blogger's account has since been deleted from Blog*Spot (currently cached on Yahoo!), but he provided extended details to French blog Le blog de ¥€$ (English translation). Netvibes has since claimed to patch "a security vulnerability in webnotes" exploited by this developer. I alluded to some of these issues with stored user information, phishing, and general brand confusion in a post two months ago…
Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online. Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr. You might automatically translate your favorite news sources to your native language, or only…
Technorati launched a new search annotation feature today, letting site members briefly explain the rising popularity of a keyword or phrase. The original idea for Technorati WTF came from a few Technorati super fans and an internal hack day over a year ago. Backstory Technorati's top searches have always been a good way to track popular news themes of the moment. Top searches against a blog search engine often correlate with the news and information the blogosphere is hunting for at any given time. If a web hosting company was offline for an extended period of time, you'd start seeing…
Earlier tonight I attended a Windows Vista launch event in San Francisco and was surprised to find not a single person in line to buy the software less than an hour before launch. CompUSA stayed open late to provide hands-on demonstrations of Microsoft's new Windows Vista and Office 2007 but for most people I talked to in the store the event was a learning experience and a chance for some special sales and discounts. When I left about 45 minutes before Vista officially went on sale to consumers there were no eager customers ready for launch. Potential customers picked…
In this post I'll walk through some of the ways web application developers take advantage of local storage to speed up applications, persist user preferences, and enable features for "occasionally connected" users.
If you walk into any of Google's 500 bathroom stalls you might notice some Python on the walls. Google places tips for its developers above every urinal and bathroom stall to help expounding the virtues of well-tested code, helping a Google engineer stay productive even when nature calls. Google is releasing its "Testing on the Toilet" series on a new testing blog under a Creative Commons license, so now anyone can decorate their bathroom walls to look just like Google. No, it's not a April Fools joke, Google really does promote 100% coverage in its bathroom stalls….
Modern web APIs embrace the self-publishing tinkerer, making integration an easy step for a variety of web publishers. A few lines of HTML and a quick copy and paste of some JavaScript might be all a publisher needs to add new functionality to their site or roll out a completely new feature. I think the most successful developer programs will offer resources for the tinkerers as well as the developers, extending their reach and developer base beyond those with a knowledge of post versus get. The Google Gadgets getting started guide walks would-be gadget makers through the process of creating…
SF Tech Sessions is back after a brief holiday break! This month's theme is gadgets connecting people on the move, downloading relevant information and sharing new information with others through cellular and open WiFi networks. I've chosen three startups (two launched within the last 6 months) who are well on their way to changing an existing well-proven category with network smarts. This month's SF Tech Session, Connected mobile gadgets, takes place this Thursday, January 18, from 7-9 p.m. at CNET in San Francisco. Recent Best of CES winners Dash Navogation , Zing Systems, and OQO will present their approach to…
