Beyond the Code
or, how to win friends, influence people and make a living by writing software
Thursday 1 November 2007, 1:32 PM
OpenSocial doesn't knock down walls
Google's OpenSocial API is an interesting move, and it's great for developers. Common APIs across platforms have always helped speed of development and adoption, whether the platform in question has been the hardware, operating system, virtual machine or web browser. Now there's a lot more reason to develop a Social Networking application -- your audience has just got a lot larger.
It's not quite as simple as that, though. What OpenSocial doesn't do is stop current Social Networks being walled gardens -- if you're on LinkedIn you still won't be able to add someone on Facebook as a friend, and hence you won't be able to share an OpenSocial application with them.
Walled gardens can only go so far. If you're old enough to have had a GSM mobile in the early 90s, you may remember when you couldn't send an SMS from one network to another, so no-one used it. Now it's one of the networks' biggest money-spinners. Email would be a non-starter if you couldn't send a message to someone who had a different ISP. Social networks will remain something of a plaything until my system can talk to yours.
There are people trying to build open social networks, where there is no central server, but instead we're all masters of our own small domain. Technologies like OpenID, FOAF and good old RSS make such a thing possible, but it's not as straightforward as just signing up for a new account on a web site. Ask most users of Facebook to find hosting space, install a web application and configure it and most of them just won't bother. That's why the existing social network sites need to adopt these open standards and allow interoperability of data, not just APIs.
OpenSocial is good for developers as developers, but for social networks to be good for you as an individual and as a business, they need to be much more open than this.
Wednesday 8 November 2006, 4:17 PM
Freebies galore
I thought I'd share with you some of the more interesting items being given out in the exhibition hall at TechEd Developers 2006. In addition to the normal pens and t-shirts, there are a few more, less obvious freebies on offer:
From Intel, USB rechargeable torches
From both Perforce and Business Objects, balsa wood toy planes
From Macrovision, a pen incorporating a bubble wand
From ATX Software, ping pong balls
From Ivar Jacobson Consulting, insulated travel mugs
and the pièce de résistance, from PreEmptive Solutions, black boxer shorts
Tuesday 7 November 2006, 3:41 PM
Press Release speak, pt. 1
This is the kind of thing journalists get sent on a daily basis. This is meant to make us write nice things about companies. From a press release from BridgeHead Software:
"UK companies are markedly less willing than their US counterparts to seek out and embrace new techniques for managing archived data over the long term."
And they wonder why we don't write about them.
Tuesday 7 November 2006, 8:17 AM
Such a beautiful horizon
I'm in Barcelona for Microsoft's TechEd Developers 2006, where they're going to tell us how wonderful Visual Studio, SQL Server and the .NET framework are. Much the same as they did last year, then.
Sarcasm aside, they've split the developer event from the IT Pro (you can't call them Sysadmins) event this year, which is good, since it makes the conference smaller and more focused. While programmers often do need to do some system administration, especially during testing, the day-to-day business of the two roles are different in all but the smallest companies.
I'll be writing up the main stories of the event over on Builder UK, but I'll blog the other goings on of the conference right here. Right, Keynote speech, here I come.
Thursday 2 November 2006, 1:00 PM
Web Science, texting, and creative misuse
You'd have thought that, having invented it, Tim Berners-Lee would know how the web worked. The Web Science project he wants to launch will study the World Wide Web, how it's working and what's being done with it. This might sound a bit pointless -- surely he just has to look at the web to see what people are using it for? -- but Berners-Lee has a very good point: there are so many different things being done on the web, in so many different ways, that it's difficult to tell what works and what doesn't. None of this is anything to do with the W3C's traditional area of markup languages, protocols and specifications; it's about the human aspect of the web.
The technology that makes the web possible is deliberately simple, open and flexible. This gave it a low barrier to entry -- particularly compared with Ted Nelson's stillborn Project Xanadu -- and meant that people were able to run in all directions with it. It also meant it was impossible to keep track of what applications people used it for. Sure, most people creating the web know how a web site works, but ask them and chances are they'll start talking about HTML.
It's important for anyone creating an information system -- even those that don't involve "computers" -- to realise that people aren't going to use it in the way you intended, and they're even going to use it in ways that never crossed your mind. A prime example of this is the Short Message Service on mobile phones. This was added to the GSM standard, almost as an afterthought, with applications like voicemail notifications and telemetry in mind. Had you told the engineers responsible that years later SMS would be used by skool kdz txtN ea othR 2 sA SUL, I imagine they'd have been horrified. Why go to all that bother, when you can use the same piece of equipment to just talk to each other?
We're an inventive species. Our ability to take something designed as a tool for one thing, and turn it into a tool for something else is how we make progress much of the time. For this to be truly successful, we should take the time to look back at ourselves to see where we're doing this well, and where it's not going so great.
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