Personalized homepages have been around for over 10 years and recently have gathered increased attention as a new generation of personalized homepages enter the space. The programmed personal homepage is changing, with cobrands and individual users increasingly taking command of their own content. Users might customize their homepage with cookie-stored preferences, a logged-on account, an affinity group such as a Dell computer, a broadband connection from AT&T, or a membership in the Sierra Club. In the future these pages might change over time, adapting to the changing online interests and behavior of each user. In this post I will provide…
Category Archives: Software
Programmed personal homepages over the last 20 years
The web is changing, but it all starts with your personal home page. What is the first thing you see when you start your browser? Is it useful and tailored to you, or a collection of advertisements and meaningless promotions for portal services? The recent $15 million funding of one-year-old startup Netvibes combined with the ramp-up of Microsoft’s Live.com and iGoogle are changing the worldwide web doorway into a customized experience combining many brands and services. In this post I’ll summarize the history of pre-programmed start pages and take a look at where we might be headed in the near…
Watching a Firefox beta rollout
I visited Mozilla HQ this afternoon to discuss product strategy and positioning with a few full-time staffers. My visit happened to coincide with the release of Firefox 2 beta 2, giving me a brief glimpse into a world where your every move is both public and frequently reported (accurately and inaccurately) to a tech news hungry audience. A few news sources read the Firefox 2 status meeting notes from Tuesday and noticed beta 2 should go live today, August 31. Each release includes internationalization into 40+ languages, so rollouts are handled in stages as each piece is integrated and…
NewsGator Enterprise 1.4 adds desktop client sync
NewsGator released version 1.4.1 of its enterprise feed management server yesterday afternoon. Users of the new version can now use NewsGator desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or Inbox to interact with their feeds. Much better than a corporate intranet page in my opinion, but it’s good to give people choices. The new version also has better support for detecting and highlighting enclosures, placing files into special folders such as “My Podcasts.” Hopefully new products and updates to enterprise feed readers will create a new market of viewers for the blogosphere, connecting a larger population with automated news delivery….
Rewriting Digg feeds using Atom 1.0
Digg currently uses RSS 2.0 as a lightweight API, adding their own namespaced elements to explain Digg-specific values within the XML. The current Digg feed reinvents some elements (digg:category???) I feel could be better marked up with existing standards and namespaces. I’ll use Digg’s data in this post to show how some complex data and relationships can be expressed using Atom 1.0. Current Digg Technology feedSample Rewritten Digg Technology feed in Atom 1.0 Simplifying drives adoption It’s important to express your data inside pre-defined elements and attributes when possible for easy parsing by the many feed libraries used by…
Facebook Developer API
Social networking site Facebook has opened up access to its service via a set of RESTian APIs, giving developers access to a user’s profile data, friend list, inbox, calendar, photos, blog posts, and more. The API could be used to create a desktop or mobile version of a user’s Facebook data or easily migrate them to a new social network, photo site, or calendar. (via GigaOm) Web applications are limited to 100,000 requests a day and desktop applications are restricted to 5 requests per second….
AOL acquires Userplane
AOL acquired Userplane today, a 12-person startup in Los Angeles powering text, voice, and video chat for MySpace, IGN, Honda, Date.com, and others. Userplane is the first startup featured at SF Tech Sessions and later acquired but I know they won’t be the last. Attendees of April’s tech session had a sneak peek at the MySpace instant messaging integration a week before it was formally announced at Digital Hollywood. Userplane is a small, privately funded team and will continue to deploy white-label messaging solutions to sites around the Web. The network will now federate with AIM’s network, allowing custom accounts…
OS X Leopard includes feed platform?
The developer preview of OS X 10.5 “Leopard” includes an integrated feed syndication platform with Bonjour integration according to a message board posting from a WWDC attendee. The software was distributed to all conference attendees and should be available on your favorite file-sharing network shortly. A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery. The new framework would provide an easy interface for Mac developers to include feed syndication features inside their products and share user data across…
Open Source Lab Rackathon
The Open Source Lab at Oregon State is having a fundraising drive to continue their existing work and take on a few new projects. OSL serves up hosting and download space for Apache, Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, PostreSQL, and many others. A $20 places your name in 10-point font on a piece of paper attached to the server cage for a whole year! Each additional $20 donated increases your font size by 1 point size. OSL sysadmins will have to look at your name for a full year and you’ll be helping a good cause. You…
Leaving Microsoft
I am leaving Microsoft to start my own company. My last day at Microsoft is next Friday, August 18. It’s uncertain whether Microsoft will continue the feed platform work I started, but it’s some good stuff so I hope they do. RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as “the UNIX pipe of the internet” as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways. I joined Microsoft in April excited to change the world and build an Internet-scale feed platform to power…