Mozpad Meeting Tomorrow

A quick reminder that we have a Mozpad meeting scheduled for tomorrow in #mozpad.

A draft agenda is on the wiki. I’d welcome any changes or additions that folks might have.

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My (Yahoo) Pipe Dream

With all the entertainment options available nowadays, I constantly feel like I’m missing something. Unfortunately the online solutions for keeping track of what’s going on in Prague are few and far between, and they require that you visit a slew of different websites one by one. RSS use is increasing very slowly, I suspect because so many sites depend on advertising and thus on people actually visiting their domain.

My dream is a website a la Techmeme where I can see an overview of all the things going on over the next few days that might interest me: new film releases, golf and tennis on TV (and big matches here in Prague… a rare occurrence), concerts, new video downloads, new podcasts and the occasional artsy happening (gallery opening, museum exhibition, theater, modern interpretive dance, etc.) in case I happen to be feeling particularly sophisticated. (Actually forget about the modern interpretive dance. I never feel that sophisticated.) I also want to see at a glance the weekend’s weather in the various local golfing hotspots. Obviously there has to be a monster filter operating to keep me from getting overwhelmed. Ideally it would learn from my preferences and prioritize events based on how likely I am to be interested.

Since nothing like this is going to exist any time soon, at least not for Prague, I’ve decided to build it myself in my “spare time” while trying out some of the latest greatest web tools. This might take years considering the time I have to devote to it, but I did manage to take the first baby steps last weekend while pretending to watch a fairly boring golf tournament on Sunday evening. This involved nothing more than constructing a customized RSS feed of new movie releases combined with IMDb ratings.

IMDb doesn’t have any kind of web API (would someone please make a wikified open source movie database with user ratings?), so I decided to try OpenKapow as a way of scraping the data into something machine processable. I downloaded their massive Java-based design tool, but never got to use it since I found an existing robot that does exactly what I wanted.

Then I scooted over to Yahoo Pipes, something I’ve been wanting to try for ages. My impressions:

• The user interface is amazingly slick. This is AJAX at its smooth-scrolling dragging-and-dropping best.
• The programming paradigm is a bit disorienting for a old-school procedural hacker like myself, but it’s clean and consistent, and when it starts to make sense it’s pretty darn nifty.
• They could use far more tutorials, examples and documentation. One example for each little widget, with no overview of the programming model that I could find, is painfully insufficient.
• The forums are great. There appears to be a group of passionate and knowledgeable users who are keen to help out struggling newbies.
• It works! The service was apparently suffering some hiccups when I started playing around with it, which was a bit frustrating, but people on the forums assured me that this was a very rare occurrence. When I tried it again a couple of days later I encountered no problems whatsoever.
• I can’t see this scaling as a centralized service. All of the filtering and mashing up should happen on the client. I’d love to see this as part of AllPeers at some point in the (probably rather distant) future. I suspect the glitches I encountered were to due to overload, and just now I received a weird error message when I tried to published the final version of my pipe.

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AllPeers on Facebook

I am not sure why we did not do this before, but we now have an Official AllPeers Group on Facebook. So if you are a Facebook user, feel free to join us there.

Next we will see how we can use their newly released Facebook API to integrate your AllPeers account into your Facebook account. Stay tuned.

Of course we are still on MySpace with 285 friends at the time of writing this post.

UPDATE: As mentioned in the comment, there is also an AllPeers Group in Last.fm

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Mozpad Update

This will be my last Mozpad-related post on Planet Mozilla, since we now have a shiny new moon orbiting it, thanks to Benjamin Smedberg.

The kickoff meeting was fruitful and a full transcript is online on the Mozpad wiki. I’ve also added a list of potential goals for Mozpad to the wiki. Please step up and volunteer to champion a goal if you think it is important. If I forgot any goals or included braindead goals that no idiot would ever want to get behind, please comment as appropriate on the wiki. I also added a statement of the organization’s scope and annotated the members list to indicate people who have made a time commitment.

The next Mozpad meeting is scheduled for May 30th (next Wednesday) at 4pm UTC in #mozpad. See you there!

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Twitter, the New Greasemonkey

Maybe I’m just weird but Twitter reminds me of Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey, as you doubtless remember, is a tool that makes it easy to install “user scripts” that modify the content of specific webpages as they are loaded. It can be used to hack up websites and bend them to your will (adding a “Delete” button to Gmail, for example, back in the days when it didn’t have one).

I was fascinated by Greasemonkey and wrote a bunch of handy scripts. But I was also concerned that the technology would never catch on because of its inherent weaknesses. As it transpires, I was right and no one talks much about Greasemonkey anymore. I disabled my last script (the Bloglines Sidebar Squeezer) when I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few months ago.

I have similarly mixed feelings about Twitter. It has a couple of clear use cases, like starry-eyed fans following their idol’s every move or teenagers with nothing but time on their hands texting their friends en masse until their thumbs turn blue. Just like Greasemonkey is still a great tool for JavaScript developers who want to modify their view of website with a quick hack. But both tools do much more to demonstrate a clear and pressing need on the part of users than to solve it in a satisfying way.

In the case of Twitter, this need is to have more flexibility in how internet communication tools let us organize communities and how we are alerted when new messages arrive. But it doesn’t make sense to sign up for a whole new service to achieve this when we already have one or more IM programs. Instead, IM clients should let us create persistent group chats and receive particular types of messages by SMS (the latter is already an option in some apps, I believe). There are certain types of messages I’d like to send to a specific group of people, and occasionally I’d like to have certain messages sent straight to my cellphone. But it’s hard for me to see Twitter-as-a-standalone-solution as more than just a flash in the pan.

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Two Things I Love About Mozilla

I’ve done my share of criticizing Mozilla recently, constructively I hope, and I dare say there’s more where that came from. Naturally there are also many things that appeal to me about Mozilla, and if the balance weren’t firmly in the plus column we’d be profoundly unhappy campers right now. But for some reason we humans tend to be far more vocal about what we dislike that what we like.

I’ve worked on major projects with Microsoft tools and Sun tools, and it’s frankly laughable to imagine them paying more than cursory attention to a bunch of kvetching in the blogosphere, however apt. The fact that even the upper echelons of Mozilla have reacted swiftly and thoughtfully to the recent debate is a clear indication that the open source revolution extends far beyond publishing lines of code. Modern organizations could learn a whole heck of a lot from Mozilla about how to react to and interact with their customers and users. So that’s the first thing.

But the most important thing I love about Mozilla is perhaps getting lost in the confusion of our dynamic, distributed discussion. When we first decided to develop AllPeers in 2002, we had had such bad experiences with multiplatform development that we went ahead and built a Windows-only client, only to be beaten down by our users, who protested that they wanted to share with their family and friends who have OS X or Linux.

So we gave it a go with Mozilla, and lo and behold the use of web technologies (designed from the ground up to run everywhere) means that the multiplatform thing actually works. What’s more, our runtime (Firefox) is 4ish megabytes instead of dozens. I just downloaded a Java-based app and the 100+ Mb package is ongoing proof that their deployment model is still hopelessly borked.

Everyone talks about Mozilla as the guardian angel of the open web, but for me the biggest priority is to make it as easy as possible for users to adopt my software. They don’t care if it’s powered by open technologies, Java, C#, COBOL, vacuum tubes or a midget hidden in their coffee table, as long as it’s quick and easy to download and use. It looks like others are catching up, which was the impetus for all the hue and cry about Mozilla the Platform in the first place. But for the time being, it’s still the only platform I can imagine using for a multiplatform consumer app.

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Mozpad Kickoff Meeting Draft Agenda

I’ve added a draft agenda to the wiki for the kickoff meeting. I’m totally winging it so if you’ve have relevant experience or are just plain smarter than me, please feel free to add/remove/change stuff. I’d suggest that I chair the first meeting, but if anyone wants to be chairperson (or co-chairperson) moving forward, that would be excellent. Please let me know before or during the meeting, if that is the case.

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Mozpad Meeting Update

A few people weren’t available and some in California complained that it was too late in the day. So I’ve moved the kickoff meeting to Wednesday May 23rd at 4pm UTC (which is currently 5pm in the U.K. due to daylight saving time).

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Mozpad Update

The Mozpad wiki is now up. I’d like to have a kickoff meeting in #mozpad to discuss goals and next steps. I’m suggesting Monday May 21st at 6pm GMT to try to cover as many timezones as possible. If this doesn’t work for people, let me know in the comments here or on the wiki or by email or whatever, and suggest alternatives that suit you better. I’m very keen for Mozilla Foundation/Corporation people involved in developer outreach and XULRunner development (who know who you are) to participate if at all possible.

Please add yourself to the members list on the wiki so we can get an idea of who wants to be involved.

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del.icio.us and Flickr Get Some AllPeers Love

When we announced the open sourcing of AllPeers, I explained that our Drag-n-Share product, cool though it is, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (well, platform-berg really) that we wanted to make available to other developers. We know that it will be a long process to get our framework into a form where the benefits outweigh the learning curve, and going open source was a first baby step in that direction.

Now we’ve taken a slightly larger baby step (a toddler step, as it were). Our intrepid intern Luděk has whipped up a couple of examples of how to extend AllPeers using special Firefox extensions that hook into our APIs. We’ve taken to calling these AllPeers-based extensions “AllPeers extras”.

One extra lets you post links to del.icio.us directly from the AllPeers share form. Once you’ve installed it, you’ll see the del.icio.us logo in the share form. Click on it and you’ll be prompted to log in, and once you’ve done that you can enter tags and post any link at the same time you share it with your AllPeers contacts, or click the little button next to the tag field to post to del.icio.us without sharing. Note that nothing will happen if you don’t have added any webpages to the little thumbnail box for sharing.

The other extension does the same thing for Flickr, so this time you need to have some images selected for sharing.

Note that you need at least AllPeers 0.56 to use these extras. They are just demos and not intended for production purposes, so please treat them as such. That said, I can see myself using both of them frequently. Get them here:

delicious4AllPeers
Flickr4AllPeers

For the geeks among you, Luděk wrote up a fairly detailed artlcle about how to create your own AllPeers extra. You might also want to browse the source code.

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Tweet, Tweet

When I first checked out Twitter a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was a hearty “wuh!?”. Why would I care what anyone, friend or foe, is doing every minute of the day? And more to the point, why would anyone out there care what I had for breakfast and how my digestive system is handling it (a carb-ridden ham/cheese sandwich and quite well, thanks for asking)?

But since people won’t shut up about it, particularly my new favorite gym companion, I’ve been inclined to give it another shot. The last straw was when I saw that the WHAT WG HTML 5 draft has a Twitter ID for following changes to the spec. There’s a there there, folks, and like all social software the only way to really grok it is to use it.

I’ll be making an effort to keep a stream of AllPeers news going, so if you’re interested sign up and be my friend (insert plaintive tone here). My ID is “plasticmillion”.

UPDATE: So far I’m not that impressed, plausibly because the service has been down almost continually since I posted this. When up it seems to drop most updates. I’ll try again in a couple of days and probably give up at that point if they haven’t solved what are apparently stability issues.

UPDATE: Service seems to be running stably now, but I still have only 5 followers. Does that mean that no one who reads this has Twitter, or does nobody love me? Just in case it’s the latter, I cried myself to sleep last night.

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Web2.0 Innovations Come With Web1.0 Issues

I woke up this morning to find out the announcement of 2 new features: MeeboRooms on Meebo and full-screen streaming TV on vpod.

Both features are great add-ons to these sites. I really like what Rodrigo, Ivan and their team are doing with vpod. Their premium video player is sleek and clean and the loading time extremely fast. Of course, as YouTube & Co know very well, the Achille heel of such services is the pressure success can put on the backend infrastructure and the associated costs. This is one of the reasons why we, at AllPeers, believe distributed content over a P2P network is the only long-term viable solution for such businesses if they want to control their costs efficiently. This is no trivial task and a lot of innovations is still required both at the network architecture level and the consumer equipments level but there is no doubt, at least for me, the YouTubes of the future will contain some form of distributing computing (beyond the browser as we know it today).

Chat rooms are a great addition to existing online properties and sure enough the move from Meebo is a great one. There again, the centralized nature of such a service is its Achille heel (why would they limit to 80 participants if they did not have backend limitations?) but this is not the most important issue. Just like AOL discovered in its early days, the problem in public chat rooms is not the technology. It’s the people or more precisely the abuse people can inflict to each other thanks to the “anonymity” of the web. Sure enough, NewTeeVee had to disable their Meebo public room after 2 and a half hours because “the moderation had become too intensive”. If you are going to run public chat rooms be prepared for your 2 worst enemies: Abusive users and SpamBot. The best protection against these pests are moderators and SpamBot Removers. If you are lucky enough to have a thriving community you can rely on volunteers. You will need to hire a community moderator manager who will have to play the bad/good cop all day dealing with complaints of moderators abusing their “power”. The alternative is of course to pay for professional moderators but in both case do not think that introducing public chat rooms is only a matter of throwing a few lines of HTML into a webpage.

Anyway, I sound like an old whiner and that’s not the goal. Good luck to these new services!

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Only the Paranoid Survive

Apparently Chris Messina’s manic video diatribe has succeeded in reframing the Great Mozilla Platform Debate as “should Mozilla dump Firefox”, the answer to which is so obviously “no” that we risk losing sight of actually interesting and important questions. Since those questions were already being studied carefully in an ongoing dialog that Chris studiously failed to notice or mention, the principle merit of his contribution may be that he annoyed Mike Shaver enough to provoke him into posting one of his always entertainingly grumpy blog rants:

…he has Fortune Cookie 2.0 down so pat that I expect to open the BBC one day and find out that Venezuela is going to bust his patent and start making generics.

I don’t know what that means, but I love it! I spend hours a week trying to annoy Mike but I never seem to succeed to the same extent.

But there is a real issue here, and “we accept patches” is not a satisfying blanket response to every criticism leveled at Mozilla (the Foundation, the Corporation or the bag of bits). I could get all grumpy myself and say that I can’t get code into Mozilla, or even get my patches reviewed, without extensively nagging one of the inner circle. I could complain about the multitude of times I’ve heard “yes Matt, that would be a useful addition to the platform, but I can’t see it getting in there since Firefox doesn’t need it.” So the characterization of the community as a shiny happy online kibbutz is a bit misleading. My real point, however, is that there is a whole array of fascinating, deep and challenging questions that we are now faced with, not because of bellyaching by Chris or anyone else, but because the web is evolving and Mozilla (and I use that term in all its ambiguous glory) is largely sailing in uncharted waters, technologically and organizationally.

In his masterful autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove discourses at length about so-called “strategic inflection points”, moments in a company’s life when it is faced with a decision to bet the farm on some new and risky direction. One example he gives is the decision by Intel in the 1970’s to shift its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. If the bet pays off, the company soars to new heights of success and adulation. If it fails, the executives in charge resign “to spend more time with their families” and concentrate for the rest of their lives on honing their golf skills. But the worst scenario of all is to ignore the underlying shift and continue with business as usual while some younger, more nimble competitor eats your lunch and washes it down with a refreshing draught of smug self-satisfaction.

Is Mozilla faced with such an inflection point? I think so. I’m very far from convinced that most of what we consider “browsing the web” will occur in a web browser a few short years hence. Am I personally doing everything I can with the measly 24 hours a day that our planet’s rotation has provided me with to help face this challenge? I think so, and that includes all these annoyingly smarmy blog posts on the topic. But what the hell do I know anyway? This is a nut we need to crack together, and I sincerely hope that ravings from the lunatic fringe about dropping Firefox or killing off SpreadFirefox won’t distract us from the task at hand.

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Mozpad, a Mozilla Platform User Group

I got into the office today to find Chris Messina’s “Thoughts on Mozilla” at the top of Techmeme. Naturally I fired up my iPod and brought his sprawling rant with me to the gym at lunchtime. Nothing is more conducive to a long and intensive workout than a long and intensive take-no-prisoners technology-oriented audio screed. So now I’m pumped, folks, physically, mentally and possible even spiritually.

I could write at least three blog posts about Chris’s piece, which covers a lot of ground. The most immediately relevant topic for me, however, was what he had to say about Mozilla as a platform. He echoes many of the same themes as the Paul Rouget essay that I translated and which I subsequently haven’t shut up about. No one is going to fall off their chair if I say that Chris is absolutely right about the strategic value of the platform for the Foundation, although I’m not nearly as down on Firefox as he appears to be, unless we’re talking very long term. Every platform needs a killer app, after all.

Anyway, the real point of this post is to follow up on the multitude of comments I’ve received here and by email, the gist of which is well-summarized by Doug Turner:

I think it would be up to the “all peers” of the world, to work with the foundation and other interested parties, to pool resources and make this “building application on top of mozilla technology” a priority for the foundation. Why wait on the Mozilla Corporation to do what Open Source enables you to do — take your destiny in your hands, try to collaborate with others with shared interests, and make better software!

As it transpires, I had an indepth discussion with another high-profile platform user at FOSDEM about forming some sort of user group for companies who are developing apps on top of Mozilla. This idea has been an inch or two forward of the back of my mind since then, but it took all of this hullaballoo for me to take the first steps towards getting it of the ground. So far this involves a tentative name, Mozpad (”Mozilla Platform Adherents and Developers”), for which I’ve registered the relevant domains. And this blog post.

What I have in mind is very much in the mold of the classic technology user group: a place where we can get together, compare notes and provide as much support as possible to Mozilla in advancing the platform in the service of third-party developers. If people like this idea, I’ll set up a wiki on mozpad.org and we can get things started. Please please please do contact me publicly or privately to let me know what, if anything, you like or hate about this initiative.

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AllPeers 0.56.3, Nothing Major But Install it Anyway

Just a quick note that we fixed an annoying new bug in AllPeers that might have affected network connectivity in some cases. If you noticed that it was taking a long time to connect when starting Firefox, then you encountered the problem. So run folks, don’t walk, and install version 0.56.3.

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