Places Going?

One of the defining notions of my professional career for many years now has been that software development is far too difficult, especially considering that we tend to reimplement the same basic functionality over and over again. Stuff is created by the user, generally through some kind of forms-based interface or retrieved from a remote source, it is stored somewhere and (increasingly) send over the wire to other people. My standard AllPeers pitch extends this by explaining that, whatever difficulties traditional client/server development might present, peer-to-peer architectures are an order of magnitude harder. Hence our decision to make AllPeers a platform that we can build our apps on top of, avoiding the need to perform this rocket science over and over again.

I was reminded of this when I saw Ben Goodger’s announcement the other day that Places, a greatly enhanced bookmarking/history module, will not make it into Firefox 2.0. I know a lot of the Mozilla and Firefox developers, and they’re exceptionally talented, so the fact that theoretically straightforward features like those offered by Places take so long to get up to production standard strongly reinforces my point about software development in general.

Now imagine that Places were meant to let you share bookmarks with people, del.icio.us style, as well as managing them locally. A peer-to-peer network topology would be of huge value since it would greatly reduce the reliance on centralized infrastructure. See where I’m going with this? It’s going to be a while before we have an AllPeers API to let developers do this, but I hope that it won’t take that insanely long. And when we do, things like Places-on-social-software-steroids will be a snap.

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2 Comments »

1. Places won’t make it to 2.0? hell! So 2.0 will have as nearly unusable history as firefox has now? wow…

   Comment by GG — 4/28/2006 @ 6:48 pm

2. I visit the status webpage for Firefox 2.0 weekly and I was dissappointed to read about this. Like Schroepfer says though, there are many other improvements that shouldn’t be overlooked. I’m looking forward to the release in August.

   Comment by wom — 4/28/2006 @ 10:08 pm

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