Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 7 of 72.

Google Code Search

Google has a new search product focused on source code. It peeks inside tarballs and other recognized formats, allowing you to search the index by regex, license, or language. It’s pretty easy to see how many projects are using a given library (such as feedparser or magpie) and keep inventing new ways to explore software. You can access the code search engine through a GData Atom feed for easy integration wherever you choose. I find Google Code Search is easier to use than Koders, and may come in handy when looking for different ways of approaching a particular programming…

NetRatings finds 40% of online Britons use news feeds

A study by Nielsen//NetRatings found 40% of Britons receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop but 69% had never heard of Really Simple Syndication. About 15% of the people surveyed have heard of an iPod but are not sure what it is. A three-page PDF summarizing the study is available from NetRatings. The use of acronym’s caused a marked drop in user knowledge. 29% of those surveyed knew what “IM” meant but 86% knew the term “instant messaging.” The average online Briton now owns 4-5 digital or networked devices. 3G mobile phones were more common than iPods and…

Google Gadgets on your webpage

Google “Universal” Gadgets are now available for blogs and pages around the web. A single Google gadget can now be deployed on Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, or via a JavaScript embed on any editable webpage. You can add PacMan to your blog sidebar or display photos uploaded to Picassa on your MySpace page, or add a Google Reader viewer anywhere. Google’s support for webpage embeds brings the Google Reader story full circle. The team originally envisioned an RSS widget available on a blog sidebar and the project grew into much more. You can now access the…

Open Hack Day helps build YDN from the inside

Yahoo! hosted a public hack day last weekend, inviting 400 developers to learn more about the company, web development best practices, and how to use Yahoo! services in their own products and projects. The Yahoo! open hack day was the first big effort by a newly formed team seeking to gather support inside and outside Yahoo! as the programming world begins to embrace connected services in the data cloud. In this post I will provide some background on the team behind the event and present some of the direct and indirect benefits obtained within Yahoo! for their hard work. Background…

Microsoft awards three Windows Live MVPs

Microsoft has awarded three web developers with its Most Valuable Professional status. The MVP program is Microsoft’s way of recognizing the work and contributions of independent developers and these individuals are rewarded with a fast-track to product feedback teams among other benefits. The first three awards include a consultant in Australia who maintains the Via Virtual Earth community and a consultant in Washington D.C. who creates Microsoft gadgets. Recognition of independent third party developers and community leaders will play a significant role in the rollout of web as a platform strategies from big Internet companies. How do you reward…

Netvibes 2.0

Netvibes pushed their latest release live tonight, unveiling new visual designs and a few new modules. Founder and CEO Tariq Krim refers to the release as Netvibes 2.0 on the official Netvibes blog. The new version of Netvibes features themes, video search, blog search, a MySpace module, and more. You can choose your favorite color backdrop ranging from gray to pink. It would be cool if I could set a theme by tab, such as making my soccer tab blue to match Chelsea but keep my other tabs green. The new MySpace integration allows you to track the latest information…

Yahoo Mail introduces web APIs

Yahoo Mail announced a SOAP and JSON-RPC API this morning at Yahoo! Hack Day. The new calls allow any developer to access a Yahoo! user’s existing mail preferences, messages, folders, and change data through create, delete or flag. Documentation of the pre-release API is currently only available through the Yahoo! Mail developer mailing list. You can do pretty much everything that’s possible with the new Yahoo! Mail beta, including searching mail messages (including attachments), fetching mail from external POP accounts, scrubbed HTML message bodies, and MIME decodings. I’m pretty impressed with the amount of effort spent on these APIs and…

Google Reader courts the Gmail crowd

Google Reader has launched a major update to its web front-end about a year after its initial launch, redesigning its online feed aggregator to create a feed reading experience that should feel natural to users of Gmail. New features include a shared clippings service, better read/unread tracking, and the ability to share feed items easily over e-mail. The coolest new feature is Google Reader’s continuous scroll of feed items combined with automatically selecting each feed item as you move around the news flow. You’ll find a lot more access keys in the new Reader, mapped to the common Gmail…

Data launchpads of the cloud wars

The war of the data clouds will really start to heat up in 2007 as large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft open huge data centers in the Pacific Northwest fueled by cheap power and bandwidth. Our digital lives continue to be fueled by the cloud, with new data services and software that replace or complement desktop tasks coming online every month. Software as a service is the new development push, and custom build outs next to a few large dams and fiber highways are a sign of what’s next. Internet giants are building up their server…

RealNetworks releases RealTime feed aggregator

RealNetworks just launched a news aggregation site powered by syndicated content. The new RealTime site, toolbar, and screensaver provide a customized news reading experience complete with feed discovery, recommendations, and the ability to interact with subscriptions online or on the desktop. The new software will be promoted and bundled with RealPlayer, a desktop application with millions of installed users. Website visitors can customize their feed subscriptions using a cookie store or create an account to persist the data to the desktop or across multiple machines. Feed search and discoverability is powered by Feedster. The site is running Apache Coyote,…

Matt McAlister moves to YDN

Matt McAlister has changed jobs within Yahoo!, moving away from the RSS group and into the Yahoo Developer Network. He follows former RSS PM Scott Gatz into the advanced products and media side of the business under Bradley Horowitz. Matt’s move is interesting timing given the recent addition of a Yahoo! Mail full beta and all the users that come with it to the backend RSS platform. The Product Strategy group at Yahoo! continues to attract company talent into a side of the business I call “Jerry’s slush fund.” Employees are given more opportunity to think big and take risks…

Yahoo Hack Day, a career fair for an era of participation

Yahoo! is hosting an open hack day at their Sunnyvale headquarters next Friday and Saturday, introducing developers to well-known Yahoo! employees and development tools. I view the whole thing as a new take on the career fairs of the past, where introductions happen over clever code instead of a carefully crafted resume attempting to make its way through the various cogs on its way to a decision maker. You can try navigating the Yahoo! careers site to figure out which of the 115 open PHP positions are right for you. There are few details available about the event but that…

NewsGator syncs Windows RSS platform into its cloud

NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop Sync in beta. The Windows application sits in your desktop tray and keeps your feeds, folders, and item read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. NewsGator Online may be viewed in a web browser or synchronized to your mobile phone, Mac, Windows Media Center, or other applications hooked into NewsGator Online. NewsGator Desktop sync connects Windows PCs running the Windows RSS Platform present in Internet 7 and above. Synchronization is like a personal teleporter for your feed data, breaking up your data into many tiny bits capable of being reassembled wherever…

Authenticated and private feeds

Some syndication feeds are not meant to be displayed for the world to see. Our everyday lives contain private and confidential data we wouldn’t want anyone else to see, and especially not search. There are a few options for trying to keep things private in your feed aggregator but the implementations require proper coding and privacy from all implementors. Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract. Data in the wrong hands could be dangerous, and many companies will stay away from the feed syndication…

Expressing threads and comments in feeds

A feed entry is not a silo, but often connected to other entries in the feed world. In this post you will learn how to express relationships between data using RSS, Atom, and common namespaces. Comment count Reading a feed entry can sometimes evoke action in the form of commentary. Readers often become writers, leaving comments attached to a post or article. Popular technology news site Slashdot has had an active commenting community for years, and created a namespaced element to express the total number of comments associated with a specific item. 42 The above example uses the slash module…

Feed syndication beyond blog updates

Many people in the technology world view the world of RSS, RDF, and Atom as a way of outputting blog content and reading the latest information in a feed aggregator. While that simplified view is true, the full world of feed syndication is a bit more complex. Syndication feeds are extremely popular expressions of structured XML. The popularity of content production and consumption using feeds has resulted in widespread deployment of parsers able to turn something simple such as a title, publication date, and a body of text into an easily displayed message, communicating recent updates and atomic changes in…

Yahoo! bundled with Acer computers

Yahoo! and Acer announced a multi-year agreement to bundle Yahoo! Search, Toolbar, and start page with all Acer computers sold around the world. Acer is the top notebook vendor in Europe, Middle East, and Africa and third largest in Asia Pacific according to Gartner. The new deal should give Yahoo!’s international market share a nice boost. The press release mentions a cobranded homepage in the style of Yahoo!’s recent redesign. Acer will set Yahoo! as the default search in Internet Explorer 7 and Yahoo! Toolbar will come pre-installed. Yahoo! services will be present on all Acer computers shipping after October…

TechSession: Mobile communities

The mobile industry in the United States is starting to take advantage of new data networks and cheaper messaging costs to connect subscribers and their interests. It’s a world filled with acronyms describing ways to help you stay connected as you leave your home-base and wander around cell space with an info beacon in your pocket pinging the network and collecting new data in between voice conversations. What can EV-DO, HSDPA, SMS, MMS, WAP, and XHTML do for you? Next week’s SF Tech Sessions event is all about mobile communities will bring together three companies exploring new methods of communication…

Fox Interactive Media Labs testing widget platform

A small group of of Fox Interactive Media employees are working on a new widget platform called TheSpringBox. TheSpringBox allows users to embed Flash widgets in any webpage and download their favorite widgets to the desktop engine for more frequent use. The new widget engine was developed by FIM Labs just outside Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia. (via Mashable) The existence of another desktop and webpage widget engine isn’t too big of a deal, but this is a platform under development from Fox Interactive Media, home of MySpace and a huge widget economy. Peter Chernin, COO of parent company News…

Yahoo! Mail enters public beta

The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page. Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus “the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it.” Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to “the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network”, adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail’s user base of over 250 million users. The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed…

Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing

Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer. Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one “share.” The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99. I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product’s online presence, but…

Google personalized recommendations widget

iGoogle users can now add a Google Gadget to their homepage showing recommended searches, pages, and gadgets based on behavior across Google search properties. The new service builds on top of Google’s search history trends data by adding recommended destination pages and new homepage gadgets. The widget was written by “Beverly Y.” in Google’s New York office. I found the recommendations useful with some expected content and a few surprises thrown in as well. “Burning Man” might be geo-targetted since I live in San Francisco, but three RSS recommendations in the top 5 is right on. I was researching…

Star Wars tour at The Future of Web Apps

This Thursday I will lead a tour of the Letterman Digital Arts Center during the lunch break of The Future of Web Apps summit. The Letterman center is the new home of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and LucasArts. The 23-acre campus had design influence from George Lucas and is one of the most technologically advanced offices anywhere. Every artist has fiber to their desk for the fastest possible connections. The building includes a 13,500 square-foot data center and render farm for processing special effects, and every desktop computer can be added to the computing cluster for after-hours crunching….

Microsoft Max feed aggregator

Microsoft just released a new desktop feed aggregator, codename Max. Max features news displayed in a newspaper layout and two-pane interface, a bit different approach than many other aggregators on the market. MSN Filter is built-in, helping you follow the hottest news in lifestyle, music, TV, sports, technology, and movies. You can share your favorite feed items with the Filter community to help influence the recommended reading of others. Microsoft Max is available for Windows XP SP2 and above (including Media Center). It takes advantage of some of the latest hardware and software, including .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 and…

WSJ raises questions about Mobius Venture Capital

Rebecca Buckman wrote about the seemingly impending breakup of Mobius Venture Capital on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal Markets section this morning. Buckman cites “people familiar with the matter” saying Managing Director Brad Feld may break off and form his own fund, bringing a few people from Mobius with him. Mobius raised a $630 million fund in 1999 and a $1.25 billion fund in 2000. The firm does not plan to raise another fund and the article cites investors saying the funds are “well underwater” Mobius invested in blog and feed syndication firms FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati. The…