Thanks to fang5566 AllPeers v0.55 will include support for Simplified Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese but I think their little characters look totally awesome, so I went ahead and tried out Chinese AllPeers:
Pretty neat, eh? Unfortunately I had to uninstall it since I was getting a bit lost in our UI. So I’ve added learning Chinese to my todo list and I’ll reinstall once I’ve done this (should only take me 2-3 years if I apply myself). In the meantime, perhaps we should add this to our usability testing procedures. If a non-Chinese speaker can comfortably use our Chinese version, we’ll know that we’ve nailed it.
The AllPeers translation project has been a huge success, with AllPeers versions ready to go in 12 languages including four different scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Chinese). One disappointment is that we don’t yet have a version in Spanish, despite the large number of fans we have in Spain. I don’t know why this is, but if someone wants to step up and bash out a Spanish translation, that would be muy caliente! Head over to BabelZilla if you want to help out. You’ll get our warm gratitude and a cool AllPeers T-shirt.
UPDATE: The Spanish translation is now finished. ¡Que bueno!
Tim Bray explains his crisis of conscience as he finds himself increasingly linking to the Wikipedia page for certain topics instead of linking to their actual homepage. My immediate reaction was “why link at all?” At Peer Pressure our policy is to avoid linking to topics that people can easily find themselves on Google (links that I’ve dubbed “identity links”). Tim’s example, Canada Line, certainly qualifies. Entering it into Google yields their homepage and the corresponding Wikipedia article as the first two hits. Identity links provide a certain amount of convenience, but it’s so darn arbitrary which terms we choose to turn into links and (as Tim laments) what we link them to. This is why I argued at the time that these links should be generated automatically by the web browser. I certainly find this more appealing than the link bundles that Tim proposes, since these put too much burden on the page author (even finding one link is enough work for me) and are therefore unlikely to gain traction.
Whether or not you agree with this, Tim implicitly makes a much more profound point. There are certain aspects of internet and web architecture that seem to oscillate endlessly between two extremes rather than finding equilibrium at some point along the continuum. Network architectures, for example, started out as client/server (mainframes and terminals) in the 1970’s, morphed into peer-to-peer (PCs and LANs) in the 1980’s, returned to client/server in the 1990’s (the web), with P2P regaining ground in the naughty aughties.
Another good example is finding stuff on the web. The pioneer was Yahoo with their handcrafted hierarchical directory. Google then stole the mantle with the opposite approach: a fully automated full-text engine powered only by statistics. The implication of Tim’s piece is that, with Wikipedia, we are once again seeing value in the human-driven approach to search. The difference is that, this time, uncounted thousands of volunteers have taken the place of a small group of paid professionals, with results that are vastly superior to what Yahoo achieved a decade ago.
It never really occurred to me to see Wikipedia as a search engine and rival to Google, but it fact it makes a lot of sense. I certainly use it this way with increasing frequency. If I know from experience that a specific type of search will perform poorly on Google, I go directly to Wikipedia and search there. Not only can I find links to whatever I’m looking for, in many cases I can find the answer to my question directly on the site. And all this without the spam and crud of the wild wild web. Jimmy Wales recently announced that he’s working on a wiki-based search engine that has been hyped as a “Google killer”. If, as I gather, this project is still in the planning stages, my advice would be to put it to bed and concentrate instead on the ability of Wikipedia itself to compete in this space.
We know this is something you have asked for a lot of time so we made it a priority and we are now ready to accept translations for AllPeers.
For this we are going to use BabelZilla, a site dedicated to provide localizations by means of connecting Mozilla extension developers and translators.
If you want to translate AllPeers in your language, just go to BabelZilla, register yourself as a translator and look for the AllPeers extension. You will then be able to translate all the strings in your language. Of course multiple translators can work on the same language to make the whole process quicker.
Please note the version on BabelZilla is the next version of AllPeers (v0.55) which will be released in a couple of weeks with as many languages as we will have by then.
We are indeed very curious to see in which language AllPeers will be available for! We will of course send AllPeers Limited Edition Tee-Shirts to the most active members of the AllPeers translators community.
Thanks. Danke. Merci. Gracias. Dekujeme. Toda. Grazie. Arigato. Obrigado. Köszönöm. Spasibo. Tack. Hvala. Dankon…
Greetings from Styria, Austria. My name is Christoph and i wanna thank you for the nice little program called AllPeers!! And also for the great t-shirt i have won!
Thank you very much and keep on working on that masterpiece 
Could it be possible that all our users are called Chris, Christopher, Christof or Christoph? 
Thanks to Chris, one of our dedicated users, for taking his AllPeers tee-shirt all the way to China. Here he is in front of the Forbidden City under Mao’s portrait.
Keep on sending your pictures to beta at allpeers dot com if you want to achieve fame as well!
We are starting to work on the new branding for AllPeers with the introduction of these little Peers.
We have already changed our Homepage and we will soon start to integrate this design into the software. These little characters first appeared on our “Weapon of Mass Distribution” Tee-Shirt, the most requested one by our users.
After the dismal performance of my 2006 predictions, I find myself understandably reluctant to predict anything about 2007. I have strong opinions about a lot of trends, but it’s very difficult to decide whether they will reach fruition over the course of the next 12 months. I’m tempted to double down all the 2006 guesses I got wrong and see if they won’t pan out after all this year.
But instead I’m not going to make any predictions at all. New year’s prognostications have become a bit trite in the blogosphere anyway. Instead, I’ll predict stuff when I want for the timeframe I want. And don’t be thinking that I’ll then ignore the ones I got wrong (by then everyone will have forgotten anyway) while crowing from the rooftops about anything I happen to get right. Honestly folks, the thought never crossed my mind.
Dave Winer criticizes Apple in no uncertain terms for their decision to deploy a closed architecture on the iPhone. (I’m clenching my teeth and summoning all my available willpower to avoid getting sidetracked into a rant about how absurd it is to ask bloggers and journalists to “take a look at [competing] products” in response to Apple’s jaw-dropping product announcement last week. News is news in large part because it’s, um, new. If competitors want attention they should do something to attract it. But I just said that I’m not going to go there, didn’t I?)
Anyway, it’s all good since I disagree with Dave on the openness issue as well. (I’ve never met Dave in person, but I’m sure I’d love him, because he seems to have created a whole industry out of writing stuff that other people can’t help but take issue with. And, as regular readers of this blog have doubtless noticed, I’ll gladly disagree with anyone about just about anything.) He makes it sound as if the neofascist regime at Apple has decided to prevent third-party developers from freely deploying their apps on the iPhone in order to cement their tyrannical hold on power. The reality is a tad more complex. In the technology world there is a clear dichotomy between openness and ease of use. And of course openness has huge advantages, especially the facilitation of a vibrant ecosystem where innovation can flourish unchecked.
But closeness has advantages too. Why do you think that every family has to have at least one (preferably acne-ridden) techie to help them with their frequent support issues? People don’t have this issue with microwave ovens or hifis or, well, cellphones. I would argue (and I’ll bet a brand spanking new iPhone or the monetary equivalent that Steve Jobs would agree wholeheartedly) that the very openness that makes PCs so attractive to tech types makes them really easy to break if you don’t know what you’re doing. People surf around, install God knows what on their machines, fiddle settings accidentally and before you can say “IRQ conflict” their computer is in desperate need of expert attention. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.
One reason that the iPhone is a closed system is clearly to avoid this issue, just as the Mac avoided the “plug-and-pray” hell that afflicts the PC world by keeping tight control over its hardware. As Steve Jobs says in an interview with Newsweek:
You don’t want your phone to be an open platform, meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network. You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.
But perhaps even more importantly, closeness is practically a precondition for simplicity. When you let every Tom, Dick and Harriet add new features to your device, you turn it into a power user’s wet dream at the expense of alienating normal users who basically just want a single big red blinking button in the middle of the screen that says “Press Me”. This isn’t too say that the iPhone strikes exactly the right balance between extensibility and ease of use. But it’s not fair to claim that everything besides complete openness must be a cynical assault on consumer freedom.
As I watched the video of Steve Jobs presenting the iPhone at MacWorld (this is a must watch video if you haven’t seen it), something occurred to me that has nothing to do with the iPhone per se. In fact, it would have surely occurred to me earlier if I used a fancy player like those from Apple, but I use plain old WinAmp, which doesn’t make your album art dance across the screen while you’re listening to music. My screen is busy anyway displaying pages of C++ code and the like.
Nonetheless, creative use of album art to decorate music players is bound to become the norm as more people listen to music on their phone or on their set-top box. But isn’t it ashame that we have the same image for every track on the album? This made sense when there was actually a physical album to slap the art onto. But if the purpose is to have something relevant and pretty to amuse the eyes while music is playing, why not a different image for each track?
Perhaps this sounds far-fetched, but so, once upon a time, did the idea of producing an ADD-inducing video for every track, preferably with scantily clad dancers playing volleyball on a Hawaiian beach while band members sip rum cocktails and try not to look embarrassed at how trite the whole exercise has become. Compared to the modern video, a single image can’t be that much effort. The biggest barrier may be that music player software, formats and transfer protocols aren’t ready to handle this. But the new paradigm for music consumption makes the advent of a major new creative discipline — track art — seem inevitable.
If you have the double blessing of being a musician and an AllPeers’ user, I encourage you to join the AllPeers Band which is being setup in our forum. Have a look here if you want to join and make a DRM-free hit!
We have started this week to send the AllPeers Limited Edition Tee-Shirts to the happy fews who had responded to our users’ survey and by the look of it people like them and maybe we should start knitting hats too
If you have received your tee-shirt, don’t hesitate to send us a photo or upload it to Flickr so we can link to you too. If you have not received it, don’t despair it should be with you within 2 or 3 days.
I was a complete Mac virgin until about 3 weeks ago when I decided I could no longer live without a big flat-screen in my lounge. It had to look nice, be silent, have a remote control so I could play all my medias, movies, music and photos from the comfort of my deep sofa. But more importantly I did not want another box and lot’s of cables running everywhere!
I am now the delighted father of a 24 inches iMac which together with FrontRow has completely changed the way I consume digital media. I used to watch all my films and DVD in my home office sitting on a chair 
I’m now enjoying my music, my photos and my movies from my sofa. I’m not using it as a computer yet even though I’m proud to announce to the world that my 3rd song on GarageBand will certainly be a hit once I rearrange it
The first thing I did was of course to install Firefox and create an account on AllPeers for the new baby. Then it was just a matter of 2 minutes before I was transferring all my media files from my laptop and my home desktop onto the iMac via the Wifi connection. That was it. No network setup. No CDs or DVDs to burn. No USB key to move around or God knows what. Of course now I can also chat with myself from the Mac to the XP machines with the AllPeers Chat but that would be a bit of a stretch
And as I’m writing this, Steve Jobs has just announced iTV and iPhone. OK so iTV is FrontRow for the TV but the iPhone is very impressive. Just 2 weeks ago and I was once again ranting about why should phone get rid of their keyboard and just be a screen. The iPhone is a quad-band GSM + EDGE, runs OS X and has a 2 Mega Pixels camera built in. This is a beautiful piece of gear from Apple and I’ve just realized it won’t be long before I cannot live any longer without one… More from Engadget Live from MacWorld 2007
1. The initial codename for AllPeers was Spiderman,
2. The first version was a Windows-only photo-only sharing client,
3. Before we moved to a new office, our CEO (that’s me) used to have his desk (that’s mine) in the kitchen because we were running out of office space,
4. Every morning the product team stands up in a room and discuss today’s plan and issues faced the day before,
5. 3 people in the company moved countries to work with us.
Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling The Tipping Point was first published in January 2002, but I didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. And suddenly the term “tipping point” seems to be on everyone’s lips. I heard it used seemingly dozens of times at Le Web 3 conference in Paris in early December to describe the goal that AllPeers and other up-and-coming technology startups are striving for. Then when ever-insightful Firefox poster boy Blake Ross took it to Google for its evil search tips, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch couldn’t resist the (actually pretty clever) pun and blogged at length about Google’s Tipping Point.
Having just finished the book, I remember clearly what Gladwell’s coinage is intended to mean: the moment at which some sort of critical mass is attained and a low-intensity trend suddenly achieves massive growth, recognition and/or adoption. Mike’s usage is thus quite correct. Last year I visited a large Silicon Valley company that shall remain nameless and heard someone note that the tide had finally turned on Google’s golden boy status. At the time this was just wishful thinking, but it’s hard not to notice that something has recently tipped and that people are increasingly inclined to criticize, rather than blindly idolize, Google.
What I noticed today is that even the “tipping point” term now seems to be tipping, at least if a totally over-the-top article by Danny Sullivan is any indication. Danny uses the phrase to mean some sort of generic milestone, ignoring the subtly brilliant implications that gave the meme legs in the first place. How long until this banalization takes over? Maybe I’m overreacting, but it seems inevitable to me that we’ll soon be commenting on our recent fashion tipping point (stopped wearing white socks with sandals), last week’s culinary tipping point (had tuna instead of ham and cheese for lunch on Wednesday) and a major tipping point at work (Sally finally returned my stapler).
