Smart post by John Gruber:

I think Motorola knew they had Google by the balls. Google needed Motorola’s patent library to defend Android as a whole, Motorola knew it, and they made Google pay and pay handsomely. I don’t think it’s curious at all why Google didn’t simply license Motorola’s patents. Motorola held out for a full acquisition at a premium far above the company’s actual value, and threatened to go after its sibling Android partners if Google didn’t acquiesce.

A New Zealand company claims to hold the first ever official certification from Microsoft for an open source web application for the Windows platform. SilverStripe, which produces an BSD licensed CMS product, announced yesterday that had achieved the "Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2" from Microsoft. SilverStripe claims its product is the first truly open source, by Open Source Initiative's definition of the term, to have achieved this level of certification. It also claims this is also the first application written in PHP, rather than .NET, to achieve said certification.

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To achieve the certification, SilverStripe had to reach several technical requirements, including: support for Windows, IIS, and SQL Server 2008. According to the company's announcement, "SilverStripe was also one of ten initial products able to be installed at the launch of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and the Web Application Gallery."

I have two questions for readers:

1) Have you been through the Microsoft certification process with any of your products? If so, was it a difficult process?

2) Do you think this represents a turning point in the way Microsoft deals with open source? Microsoft has, after all, been very good about supporting languages other than .NET on Azure.

Discuss

In just over two weeks, Kik Messenger, the iPhone app that could quickly replace text messages, has registered more than 1 million users, and for good reason. If you're not usually a follower or a wagon-jumper, this is the time to become one, because Kik offers real-time communication, free, over a number of different platforms.

Not only is this app massively popular for a reason, but that same reason may be why you won't see it in the app store soon and time might be running out to grab a copy.

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According to the company's blog post announcing its millionth user in just 15 days, more than 25,000 people are joining the service every hour. "Viral" might be an understatement for this sort of growth.

Kik  is simply a real-time messaging service that allows users of iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones to communicate with each other. Kik can act as an SMS replacement, with the user on the other end getting a Push notification when you message them, or as a real-time chat. When chatting with someone, Kik shows a message saying when they're typing and a little icon next to each of your messages shows when it has been read. Inviting your friends is as easy as tweeting a link on Twitter, sending them an SMS invite or shooting them a quick email. It's part of this fast friend-finding, however, that might get Kik into a little bit of hot water with Apple.

According to an article by Alexia Tsotsis on TechCrunch, the app may be in direct violation of Apple's TOS by automatically importing your contacts without asking permission. Tsotsis writes that Kik founder Ted Livingston "was baffled as to why the app had been accepted into the App Store four times without contest if it in fact was in violation of Apple's TOS".

Kik May Become the Ultimate Sling Box

Kik also mentioned it would soon be adding three new features to the app - the ability to block contacts, picture messaging and a third feature they call "Sneaky Rhino". According to the blog post, this feature "will take Kik, and using an incredibly powerful technology we have developed over the last 16 months, wirelessly connect your smartphone to any PC or TV". In an interview with Venture Beat's Matt Marshall last week, Livingston showed off a bit of this upcoming functionality.

[Livingston] was able to remotely take over the Chrome browser (with my permission, of course) on my MacBook. He then played music over it -- all while remotely operating this from his phone. All I did was enter a code that he gave me so that my browser knew to pair with the phone and allow the stream. (A QR code can be used, too.) [...] It's pretty cool. Basically, Kik's technology lets you wirelessly "sling" any content on your phone to any device running on any software.  This hasn't been done before, as far as I know. Sure, AppleTV lets you stream iTunes content to the TV, but it's a closed garden. You can't run Apple content on other devices. Kik's technology allows you to stream pretty much any content on any device with a browser, whether it's a basic PC, or even a PS3, Wii or a Windows Media Center device.

For the time being, it looks like the app is still available and we say jump on that bandwagon before it leaves town...and cancel that expensive $15 a month SMS plan because you soon won't need it. Sure, Kik isn't alone in the SMS-replacement market, with apps like GroupMe, TextPlus or PingChat, but it is alone in being completely free, fast, multi-platform and growing in popularity by leaps and bounds.

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In its drive to speed up the Web, Google plans to introduce a new image format today that can cut the file size of an image by 40% when compared to a standard JPEG file. According to CNET's Stephen Shankland, this new image format, WebP, is derived from Google's WebM video technology and will make its debut later today. Google's lead product manager on the company's "make the web faster" program told CNET that "65 percent of bytes on the Web are from images." A decrease in the average size of these images could improve a user's web experience considerably.

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Rabbat told CNET that 90% of the images Google tested showed "WebP offering the same quality with 40 percent smaller file sizes." The remaining images were mostly logos and illustrations where formats like PNG currently have the upper hand. Just like the JPEG format, WebP will likely work best for photos.

New Image Format Will Fight an Uphill Battle

There are some caveats here, though. First of all, no current browser can actually display this new format yet. While Google's Chrome will likely be the first to support it, web developers and designers aren't likely to embrace a new image format until it's supported by all modern browsers. As Shankland also notes, Microsoft has made a similar move by backing the JPEG XR format but hasn't been able to get other browser developers to support this format yet (currently, it only works in the company's own Internet Explorer).

In talking to Shankland, Rabbat also noted that encoding WebP images take eight times longer than JPEG ones.

We have asked Google for more information and will update this post once we hear more (or once Google makes an official announcement).

Discuss

A few weeks ago, Five Simple Steps — the small, indi publisher I’m a co-founder of — released our second title; A Practical Guide to Information Architecture by Donna Spencer. Derek Featherstone, who wrote a wonderful foreword for Donna, summarised his feelings in one closing sentence:

This is the book that I needed 10 years ago.

I completely agree with him. And here’s why: this book makes you feel like an information architect. It makes you feel empowered with a sense of clarity and purpose that you can bring to your projects. No other IA book I’ve read made me feel like that.

I think I first came across the term IA in about 1999. I’d just started working for Agency.com in London and was partnered with a guy (sorry, I forget his name now), who ‘used to be a designer’, but was now an ‘IA’. I really did learn a lot from him directly. I learnt that Information Architecture can be a slow, tedious practice. It’s often about making hard decisions and arming yourself with the *facts* before you do. I learnt that it was vital in a project, but perhaps most importantly, I learnt that good IA is not a quest for perfection. It’s about getting in there, making mistakes and then iterating.

Getting your hands dirty
Every year in the UK, there is a horticultural show in Chelsea; the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The BBC, as always, does a stirling job at covering the event over the course of about a week. As you’d expect, there are a bunch of well-known faces presenting the proceedings, my favourite being Christine Walkden — an energetic, passionate gardener with a wonderful turn of phrase. This year — whilst sitting on a park bench, discussing the difference between garden designers and gardeners with Alan Titchmarsh — she said something that will stick with me a long while:

You have to spend some time with grit under your fingernails

This phrase really stuck with me. There really is no substitute for getting stuck in, making mistakes, learning from them and then trying it all again. To get stuck in, you need to have the confidence to do so. And that’s what Donna’s book will give you; the confidence to spend some time with grit under your fingernails.

A Practical Guide to Information Architecture is available to buy now as a downloadable PDF, ePub and preorder paperback from Five Simple Steps from as little as £12.

Microsoft rolled out Microsoft Office Web Apps on Skydrive to users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland yesterday. Users can login with their free Live accounts and create and edit Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010 and Excel 2010 documents in their browsers, and store them in the cloud. Users don't need an Office 2010 desktop license to use the apps, but the Skydrive version integrates with desktop versions of Office 2007 and 2010. There is also a beta version of Office Web Apps that can be deployed on-premise as part of Sharepoint.

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Features include:

Drag and drop uploading from desktop to browser
Real-time, multiuser collaborative document editing
Version history
Searching across documents, including documents shared by other users
Read-only access from mobile phones

The Register reports Microsoft is not officially supporting Google's Chrome browser. However, we found that we were able to create and save documents from Chrome on a Windows 7 desktop.

This offering will doubtlessly bring comparisons with Google Docs. Office Web Apps feels quite similar, and is at least as functional as Google Apps.

The on-premise option, desktop integration, and the familiar features and interface of Microsoft Office, makes Office Web Apps a strong competitor against Google's Google Apps and ZoHo as they market their office in the cloud solutions to the enterprise.

Last month, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writing for Business Insider, called on Google to buy Salesforce.com to improve their enterprise penetration. "Google Docs just can't compete with Microsoft Office on features, and while it's better at collaboration, that advantage will vanish as Microsoft moves these features to the cloud," he wrote.

Many other analysts disagreed, citing Google and Salesforce's radically different corporate cultures. But it's precisely these culture differences that Google could potentially benefit from if it really wants to step up its game against Microsoft in the enterprise.

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Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that its webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window.

In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have given permission to see the Google Calendar. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes.

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Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts), and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services.

Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in our November 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? (Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook)
The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause.

Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you.

[Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already.

Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On

Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties into Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy.

So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, augmented reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting.

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If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you'll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab.

But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you'll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.

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The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.

Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:

Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click - making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!

Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn't been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by.

We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an "incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation." The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service's future in the enterprise last week and argued that it "has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community." A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.

We can only hope that PetStatus isn't an omen of what's to come.

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Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, "displaying a news feed in a social network environment." Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be "one of the most significant social web patents" in a decade.

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there's going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We've got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we're going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.

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Working Summary: This patent appears to cover primarily implicit user activity updates (such as "person X changed their employer listed or their relationship status or became friends with person Y") and the dynamic ranking of those items when delivered in the context of a social network. In contemporary Facebook terms, it would probably cover the News Feed but not the status messages in the Live Feed. It would probably not impact what Twitter is doing today. It could impact any number of other social networks - like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. But it's possible that Facebook will only use this patent defensively. Time will tell what the company's intentions are.

18 months ago we wrote the following, as site after site adopted a Newsfeed model for delivering updates to users:
Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!

MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo!, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader and even Google Buzz - do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's? Twitter probably doesn't fall under this patent because the filing

Text of the Patent

Here's the abstract for the patent, filed August 11th, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg listed as the first inventor:
A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

An initial response from Google's Chris Messina, a leader of the Activity Streams standards organization that includes Facebook.
I hope that this is defensive and Facebook doesn't intent to enforce this patent. this is why the Open Web Foundation was instantiated, so we could work on these kinds of features without any one organization invoking patent rights. this is just one more example of how the patent system isn't architected to support the right kind of innovation.

[For all the other websites using activity streams-like formats] if this patent gets enforced, you could do it in reverse chronological order where there is no algorithmic ranking or you could license this technology from Facebook. i don't know what this means for Facebook's Platform and Connect.

It sounds crazy, but did Facebook invent the algorithm-driven newsfeed? Messina wasn't quite willing to grant that in our conversation, but it's a tough call. "Facebook certainly built the whole phenomena around the newsfeed," he said.

Don't miss: Dave Winer's take on this news.

Nick O'Neill has published the following update to his story, but I'm not buying his conclusion:
It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial.

Implicit actions are a very big deal. LinkedIn contacts making new connections or changing their jobs would be the most immediate example that comes to mind. If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social web.

There's an active conversation going on our Google Buzz page for this topic, too.

Discuss

Companies are dropping Internet Explorer 6 in droves and vendors are quickly following the lead by sunsetting support.

It's a pretty safe move on the vendor's part. Data collected by the exo.performance.network shows how quickly companies are dropping the IE6, which was first introduced in 2001.

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While Internet Explorer 6 collapses in the enterprise, Internet Explorer 8 is picking up fast:

"Current data from the exo.repository shows a dramatic spike in IE 8.0 adoption, with over 70% of Windows XP systems - sampled from the exo.performance.network's IT-centric community of nearly 23,000 registered sites - now running Microsoft's latest web browser. This compares to the less than 10% of XP systems that are still running the aging IE 6.0, and the roughly 20% who are stuck on the in-between version, IE 7.0.

And now Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Atlassian have all dropped support.

The Atlassian news appeared on its forums:

"Hi guys,

We are announcing our end of life of Atlassian support for Internet Explorer 6 on JIRA.

This will be effective from the launch date of JIRA 4.2 (target Q3, 2010). This means that JIRA 4.1 will be the last version of JIRA to support IE6. (From JIRA 4.0 to JIRA 4.1, all of the main functionality will work in IE 6; however, some of the visual effects will be missing)."

Socialtext is still providing support for IE6. Co-founder Ross Mayfield told us that, "as much as we would like to move beyond IE 6, we have enterprise-wide security-conscious customers that still require supporting it for their users. These are valuable forward looking customers for whom we must be backwards compatible."

Microsoft does not seem to be fighting the effort. They will continue to support the product. Here's what the Microsoft IE blog states:

"Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have."

Every product sees a twilight. IE6 has reached that point in the enterprise.

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Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don't choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn't a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

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Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn't obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user's Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven't customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It's important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

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If you've ever sat around mulling over different parts of an interactive map after an election or studied the New York Time's "How Different Groups Spend Their Day" graph, then you know the value of a good chart. They can suck users in and really engage them. They can take a complex concept and make it simple.

Google's latest release, the Google Chart Tools, will make it easier for sites to show their users data in a meaningful, visual and interactive manner.

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These tools are broken down into two parts: image charts and interactive charts. The image charts work off a simple URL structure, defining all of the necessary characteristics through URL parameters. The interactive charts, while still relatively simple compared to custom creation, use a slightly more complicated Javascript library.

Interactive charts will allow for showing extra data on mouseovers and simple animation. There are 30 different chart styles available, from interactive maps to pie charts, line charts to Venn diagrams.

According to the Google Code Blog, "Interactive charts trigger events, providing tool-tips and animations. In addition to a rich gallery of charts, this tool can also read live data from a variety of data sources such as Oracle PL/SQL or Google spreadsheets."

We're hoping these take off and we see more interesting visual data sets to play with around the web in the very near future.

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If you've been on the Internet for long enough, you may remember the old UNIX finger command. With finger, you could just type in a command like finger email@readwriteweb.com and the email server would return more information about this person. Today, Google enabled the next generation of the finger command - WebFinger - for all Gmail accounts with public profiles. WebFinger provides users with a standardized and decentralized way of sharing their profile and identity information online.

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Google began a small beta test of WebFinger in August 2009. Today, Google's Brad Fitzpatrick announced that the company has now enabled WebFinger fall all Google accounts with public profiles.

Making Your Email Address More Useful

You can think of WebFinger as an email-centric cousin of OpenID. While OpenID associates your identity with a URL, WebFinger links your identity to your email address. WebFinger can store metadata about your account and make it publicly accessible. This data can include your public profile data, information about other services that are used by this email address, a URL to your avatar, or - if you choose so - a declaration that this address doesn't have any metadata associated with it. The WebFinger metadata can also point to an alternative identity provider, which can be an OpenID server.

Update: we should note that while webfinger accounts look like email addresses - and often are email addresses - they can also simply point to a webfinger account that isn't actually an email address, too. It could just point to a public profile.

Currently, there are not a lot of user-facing projects that expose this data, but you can find a small demo service written by Google engineer DeWitt Clinton here.

Adding Value to Google Profiles

With Buzz, Google already put a lot of emphasis on Google Profiles and today's announcement increases the value of these profiles even more. It's important to note, though, that WebFinger is an open and free protocol, so any email service and identity provider can implement it. You can find more detailed information about the WebFinger protocol here.

Image Credit: Flickr user purpelslog.

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According to Internet security company McAfee, a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer allowed hackers in China to attack Google, Adobe and a large number of other companies, including Yahoo and Northrop Grumman. Microsoft has acknowledged this vulnerability and is currently working on a patch. Every machine running Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 on virtually every modern Windows operating system is affected by this vulnerability. In an unprecedented move, the German government has now told its citizens to avoid using Internet Explorer for the time being.

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McAfee analysis showed that whoever tried to hack Google was using a previously unknown security vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It currently looks like the attackers targeted specific individuals and fooled them into opening a link or downloading a file onto their computers. Earlier reports claimed that a vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat made these attacks possible.

Infect, Conceal Access and Siphon Data

McAffee's chief technology officer George Kurtz notes that this attack is a good example of the types of attacks that governments and large organizations are currently faced with. This new generation of malware is highly targeted and "designed to infect, conceal access, siphon data or, even worse, modify data without detection."

According to the German government, users should switch to alternative browsers, as other hackers will surely start to exploit this same vulnerability within days.

Image credit: Flickr user nickrussill / CC BY 2.0

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In December, I visited Parrot's development labs in Paris to check out the company's newest project. While Parrot is mostly known for its Bluetooth headsets and speaker systems, the company's newest project combines augmented reality with a remote-controlled helicopter. This helicopter - the AR.Drone - features four rotors that keep it stable and a front-mounted camera that is linked to an iPhone or iPod touch. The rig is controlled via an iPhone or iPod touch and the device's screen can show an augmented view of what the helicopter's camera sees.

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AR Meets the Real World

What's most exciting about this product is how it combines a real helicopter with this augmented reality view. Instead of just looking at an augmented view of the world through the phone's camera, you get to see the world through the drone's camera. The iPhone takes the view of the camera (via Wi-Fi) and replaces markers with anything from walls to dinosaurs.

During our discussion with Parrot in December, we couldn't get any information about the price of the AR.Drone out of the company's representatives. Given how sophisticated the hardware is, however, chances are that it won't be very cheap. The drone, for example, features two cameras. Besides the camera that feeds the video to the iPhone, the drone also features a second camera that is mounted underneath the structure and augments the drone's autopilot.

Hands-On With the AR.Drone

We got a chance to play with a prototype of the AR.Drone in Parrot's labs, and it took a while to get used to the controls (the app uses a combination of the phone's tilt sensors and on-screen controls to manipulate the drone). The video on the iPhone was surprisingly clear and didn't show any noticeable lag. Sadly, we didn't get a chance to try out the AR features of the app, though.

Parrot will launch the AR.Drone later this year. The company plans to demo the helicopter at CES this week but the exact date of the public launch remains unclear.

A Drone for Developers

In its current iteration, the hardware and software is clearly laid out for gaming, but Parrot also released an SDK that will allow developers to use the hardware for other purposes as well. It will definitely be interesting to see what games and other tools the developer community will come up with once the AR.Drone is launched. Parrot told us that it hopes that developers will look at the hardware as a platform, and the company hopes to create an active developer ecosystem around the AR.Drone.

More Videos

Click here for more videos of the AR.Drone in action.

Disclosure: Frederic met with Parrot during a trip that was partly sponsored by Parrot.

An Early Demo



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We all notice when a web app is acting a big sluggish. What is causing it to be so slow?Why is it not responding as fast as it should?

These are the kinds of issues that keep developers up at night.

To help solve this problem, Google is launching Speed Tracer, a new tool for the Google Web Toolkit.

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Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension. It gives developers the ability to identify problems in their web apps using a "sluggishness graph," that shows how the app is doing. If it is zero on the graph's y-axis then the app is screaming. If the y-axis is 100 then something is wrong. It is acting sluggish.

Speed Tracer is one of several new features added to Google Web Toolkit.

For example, one of the new features in Google Web Toolkit splits code to help speed up the start time of large applications. According to Google, "Code Splitting enables developers to safely and easily slice and dice their application code so that key functionality can load immediately and other features can be loaded later as needed."

These are the kinds of applications we should expect to see more of as web applications proliferate. We need more ways to do benchmarks. Services like Speed Tracer help diagnose issues to quickly improve performance. That's a critical issue in today's market. The speed of an application can be the difference for a customer. If the application is fast, they may stay and check things out. if it is slow they will split.

And when they split, who knows if they will ever come back.

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Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

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Woodward says that the Tr.im code will be cleaned up and available for hacking no later than September 15th, that the code will be licensed under an MIT Open Source license, real time click data will be made available in anonymous aggregate via service provider Gnip and a foundation or nonprofit owner to control the domain name is still being sought.

URL shortening is of course important primarily because of Twitter, where links have to be shortened in order to save characters against the limit of 140 per message. This May Twitter chose to make Bit.ly its default URL shortener, replacing TinyURL. Bit.ly's marketshare in the URL shortening world became a near instant monopoly.

This is important because these URL shorteners have all kinds of data about which links on Twitter and elsewhere are getting the most click-throughs. Bit.ly is interesting because they've been building all kinds of value ads on top of that data - real time analytics, semantic analysis of the linked-to pages and more. Many people believe that Bit.ly could become one of the hottest sources of news discovery on the web, challenging now slow-looking sites like Digg.

Woodward argues that the relationship between Twitter and Bit.ly has made the URL shortening business pointless for everyone else. It was taking up a lot of his time, causing him headaches and he was feeling pressure to dedicate more time to his company's core product, the Nambu desktop client.

Last month Woodward announced he would be closing Tr.im down and a substantial number of people freaked out. The biggest concern was that all the short links that had been created would now be broken. Some developers complained that they had invested time into building services that utilized Tr.im's analytics. In response to the uproar, Woodward changed his mind. He said he'd keep the service up for some period of time, he tried to find a seller, but today he's announcing a permanent change to the nature of the product.

Woodward argues that Bit.ly and Twitter will not expose raw aggregate clickthrough data to just anyone to develop on top of. That's what the new community-owned Tr.im is going to do. Working with activity data hub provider Gnip, Tr.im will make aggregate anonymized data available in real time, for free. That means that any random developer can build something exciting on top of that stream of data, not just the selected partners of Twitter and Bit.ly.

Woodward says that if the community can take Tr.im to 5 or 10% marketshare, then it should have a good sample of the data Bit.ly is seeing in the rest of the market. Opening that data to developers in real time would then become more valuable than anything Tr.im can offer in aggregate today.

Update: We spoke with Bit.ly's John Borthwick and this is what he had to say: "I think this is great, it means there will be a future for tr.im and having more services out there is a really good thing. [Tr.im's Eric Woodward] is short on the facts though and the facts are if you look at the clicks and encodes on bit.ly in a day, 15 million yesterday for example, 60% of them are from Twitter, less than 10% come from twitter.com. It's about product iteration and adding features. [That's why Bit.ly is so popular, Borthwick argues.] Eric made a choice and bit.ly has made a different choice." Borthwick also emphasized that Bit.ly has to invest substantial resources into scaling, something that the Tr.im community will need to take very seriously if it is to grow.

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