Archive for May, 2009

File Under: Software & Tools, Visual Design
May
21
2009

The Da Vinci Code: What Happens When You Twitter the Mona Lisa?

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What would happen if you tried to tweet the Mona Lisa? It’s a question even Dan Brown has never dared to answer, but thanks to a very creative experiment from Mario Klingemann, now we know it turns Da Vinci’s best known work into something Picasso would have loved.

Given Twitter’s 140 character limit, it might seem next to impossible to recreate something as complex as the Mona Lisa. After all, 140 characters roughly translates to a mere 140 bytes of data, never mind the complexity of stuffing actual image data into text characters.

But the complexity of the task didn’t fazed Klingemann, whose experimental image encoding technique translates the image into Chinese characters and spits out a version of the Mona Lisa that’s reminiscent of a Cubist painting.

Klingemann is using Chinese characters because they allow him to send 210 bytes of data in only 140 UTF-8 characters perfect for cramming extra data into Twitter. When the text passes through the decoder the results are what’s known as a Voronoi Diagram, a series of polygons used to convey the rough colors and shapes of the Mona Lisa.

Of course Twitter doesn’t have the decoder, so no image would show up in your Twitter stream were you to post it. Instead you’d simply see the Chinese characters. But run the data through Klingemann’s decoder and the result are what you see in the left-hand image above not exactly the Mona Lisa, but very impressive nonetheless.

If you’re curious about the details of how Klingemann pulled it off, be sure to check out his very technical explanation on Flickr (and if you like what you see, have a look at some of his other “computational experiments“).

So far Klingemann hasn’t found any practical use for the experiment, which he says began as a competition to see if it would even be possible to send an image through Twitter. However, he plans to release the code behind the encoding and decoding process to the world to see what other curious Twitter experimenters can come up with.

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File Under: Events
May
20
2009

Where 2.0: New Yahoo Tools Add Location to Unstructured Web Data

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SAN JOSE, California — A pair of new developer releases from Yahoo aims to add location information to mass of unmapped data on the web.

The first is Placemaker, a new web service that scrapes text on web pages and feeds and extracts location data from them.

Basically, you can feed Placemaker any text or XML-based data — plain text, an HTML web page, an XML file, an RSS feed, an activity stream or a set of Twitter updates. Placemaker will parse that text and code, searching for place names. Placemaker then spits out Where On Earth IDs for each place mentioned (every place on Earth has a unique WOEID), a count of how many times each place was mentioned and where in the text or code it appeared.

The announcement was made by Yahoo’s Tyler Bell at the Where 2.0 Conference taking place here Wednesday and Thursday.

Yahoo also offers this insight on Placemaker’s page at the YDN:

Placemaker is not a geocoder and does not perform street-level address recognition; it is however a geo-extraction and indexing tool designed to help determine the ‘whereness’ of a document or atomic unit of text.

Also announced at Where 2.0 was the company’s GeoPlanet API. GeoPlanet is Yahoo’s open database of millions of placenames in multiple languages, including colloquial nicknames and local slang. So, it knows Mumbai and Bombay are the same place. Likewise with New York City, NY, NYC and “The Big Apple.”

And when Yahoo says “open,” it means it: The whole database is tab-delimited and Creative Commons licensed, so it can be used in all different kinds of applications without any strict licensing requirements or fees.

Other Where 2.0 Coverage:

File Under: Events
May
20
2009

Where 2.0: Google Launches a Data API for Google Maps

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SAN JOSE, California — Google has extended its set of Data APIs for developers with the release of a Maps Data API.

The new Maps Data API lets application developers both view and store any maps or geodata from Google Maps in the form of standard Google Data API feeds. The new API is intended for all platforms — webapps, mobile client apps and desktop apps.

Google’s Steven Lee and Lior Ron made the announcement at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference here Wednesday.

The Google representatives were sure to stress the importance of real-time indexing in modern applications — making the freshest content instantly searchable seems to be at the back of everyone’s minds at Google lately. To that end, the Google Maps Data API allows for real-time indexing and persistent searching within client apps.

The project is live at Google Code right now. If you’re new to Google Data APIs, have a look at Google’s primer.

There’s an ad component to Wednesday’s launch as well. You can place geo-targeted ads within your map mashup or client application — if a user is looking at a map of Napa Valley, they’ll see an ad for a discount wine merchant.

Along with a demo of the new API, the Lee and Ron gave conference attendees a peek at how location is being built into Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome.

Google recently partnered with Firefox to add location-awareness directly to Mozilla’s browser, and it’s putting the same tech (which is based on Google Gears) into its Chrome browser. The implementation uses the W3C’s Geolocation specification that’s expected to be included in HTML 5.

In the demo, Lee showed Google Maps running in Firefox 3.5 beta 4. Just between the little zoom slider and the cardinal panning controls in the Google Maps window, there’s now a small blue button. Click on that button, and the map zooms in and recenters on your current location. It uses your active wi-fi connection to pinpoint your location.

File Under: Events, Mobile
May
19
2009

New Wave of Apps Build ‘Where’ Into the Web

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You just landed in Seattle.

You’re in town for a meeting later this afternoon, but first, you’ve got to pick up your rental car, grab a hot cup of coffee and probably spend a fair amount of time sitting in traffic.

Your colleagues are expecting you, but you can only guess as to when, exactly, you’ll arrive — there are too many uncontrollable factors slowing you down.

So, you pull out your phone and fire up an app called Glympse. You add a few e-mail addresses from your phone’s address book and hit send. Now, your colleagues will be able to go to a web page to see exactly where you are and see your estimated arrival time.

As you move closer to the city center, the Glympse app is using your phone’s built-in GPS to update your location every few seconds, keeping everything in real-time.

Of course, you don’t want to continue sharing your location with your colleagues once the meeting is over, so, after a couple of hours, the Glympse feed shuts down. Now you can safely go hit the bars and have some fun without anyone snooping on you.

“Sharing location is different than sharing photos or text messages,” says Glympse’s CEO and co-founder Bryan Trussel. “Location ebbs and flows from a personal thing to an impersonal thing, and we want to account for that.”

Glympse is just one of the companies presenting the latest in geo-aware technology at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, which takes place this week in San Jose, California.

Where 2.0, now in its fifth year, is the tech industry’s biggest showcase for the latest geo-enabled hardware and software — an area that’s hit a new level of saturation as location-based tech rapidly moves into our smartphones, our laptops and, consequently, into our experience on the web.

“Location is no longer a differentiator — it’s going to become oxygen,” says Where 2.0 conference chair Brady Forrest. “We’re reaching a point on the web where everything is going to become location-aware,” he says.

Glympse is just one example. The company is debuting its service at Where 2.0. It’s available now as a free download for Android phones. It’s also in private beta on the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. Versions for BlackBerry and Nokia platforms are in development.

The popularity of the iPhone and T-Mobile’s G1, both of which have GPS built in, is fueling much of the popularity around location-based apps. Another example is Waze, a mobile app that collects real-time traffic data from its network of users to recommend the best route home on your commute. It will even suggest the best place to look for parking.

But Where 2.0 isn’t just about mobile devices. The conference will hit all the points on the geo-aware map: Google Earth, data visualizations, open-source mapping projects, geo-enabled search, GPS gadgets — even the latest high-powered cameras being used to feed our collective mapping fetish.

All of this hardware and software adds up to a vast network of data streams the next wave of applications will be able to tap into. And while much of this technology has existed for years, getting it all to work together has been a big challenge. But that’s all about to change, says Forrest.

“We’re in the final stages of getting the platforms ready,” he says.

Where 2.0 will feature several presenters showing off new and easy ways for software developers to add location to their applications. Microsoft will present a new location platform it’s built into Windows 7. PhoneGap will demo its open-source platform for building location-aware apps for multiple devices using HTML and JavaScript.

The U.S. government will also talk about how it used simple web tools to improve geo-data on the battlefield in Iraq.

“These projects show how we’re moving away from monolithic GIS and closed databases to, ‘Anyone can do this,’” says Forrest.

Another like-minded project is DIYcity, a community site that encourages urban residents to build tools that aggregate publicly available data and improve the information supplied by cities, all using open web technologies.

“I felt like ordinary people were much more ready for this than their governments were, so I figured I would challenge people to go ahead and create these systems on their own, with or without their local governments,” says DIYcity co-creator John Geraci, who will present at Where 2.0 on Wednesday.

Recent innovations in location-aware apps have concentrated on improving public transportation systems and solving city traffic problems, areas many city-dwellers find painfully under-served by their local governments.

“It’s obvious low-hanging fruit,” Geraci says. “A tiny bit of real-time feedback and coordination at the street level could make things work better.”

To that end, some of the more active projects on DIYcity include bike sharing apps, rideshare apps and bus tracking apps. Geraci hopes that, at a certain point, the governments would get on the bandwagon and participate.

“To be honest, that’s happening a whole lot faster than I thought it would.”

The Where 2.0 Conference runs Tuesday May 19 through Thursday May 21. Webmonkey will provide on-site coverage starting Wednesday morning, May 20. Check the Events page for the latest posts. Also, you can follow Where 2.0 on Twitter at @where20.

File Under: Software & Tools
May
19
2009

Newest Flock Release Brings Twitter, Facebook Chat to the Browser

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Flock, the “social web browser” built on top of Firefox, released a new update Tuesday. Flock version 2.5 brings a feature-rich Twitter client, support for Facebook Chat and a set of handy tools for cross-posting media to multiple social networks to the open-source browser.

Flock isn’t for everyone. It’s definitely a machine built by and for social media power users, which means it will forever be firmly entrenched in the niche populated by Twitter, Flickr and Faceboook junkies. But thanks to its Firefox underpinnings, the browser is fast and stable (it’s fully current with the latest deployed Firefox code, 3.0.10). And since the social network add-ons are integrated directly into the browser, it affords an elegance and ease-of-use on those sites that have earned it a legion of loyal fans.

The new Twitter tools are the standout feature for this release. They allow you to easily track your friends’ activities and conversations, bringing Flock’s Twitter support up to speed with the level of integration it has with other supported sites like Facebook, Flickr, Digg, MySpace and YouTube.

Flock previously allowed you to interact with Twitter, but these new tools bring almost every aspect of the service directly into the browser. You can see updates from your friends, @mentions, @replies and direct messages. You can now reply, retweet and favorite directly from the Twitter sidebar client.

You can also save Twitter searches and keep them as persistent, constantly updating panels. Sadly, there’s no support for keeping multiple Twitter accounts open at once, but Flock will store more than one set of Twitter credentials, so you can switch between accounts by quickly logging out and logging back in as a different user.

It operates much like TweetDeck, the leading Twitter desktop client. But, as Flock VP of Marketing Dan Burkhart tells Webmonkey, Twitter, by its nature, makes more sense in the browser than it does in an external client.

“Twitter activity is increasingly moving more towards rapid breaking perishable and fresh information,” he says. “It’s easier to engage in that experience if you can drag links right in, sharing media and such, without having to juggle between applications.”

He also feels that Flock’s user interface for Twitter is more inviting.

“Tweetdeck and others are fantastic, but there are some who would tell you that it feels like they’re looking at a NASA panel,” he says.

For true social media junkies, there’s a new option to cross-post just about anything you do in Flock to your Facebook account. Twitter posts have an option to also update your Facebook status; Flickr uploads can be cross-posted to Facebook and so can blog posts.

The last major new feature in Flock 2.5 is persistent Facebook chat. When you’re logged in to Facebook, you’ll notice a new icon at the bottom of your Flock windows which allows you to chat with your Facebook friends even if you aren’t on a Facebook page. If you’re a heavy Facebook chat user, Flock’s messaging tools make it easier to multitask by freeing chat from the Facebook site.

Of course Flock 2.5 also contains all the niceties of previous versions — like ability to drag and drop and image into the new Twitter post window or Facebook chat window and automatically creates a link you can share with friends. In the case of the Twitter client it would be nice to see Flock incorporate some sort of URL shortening service, but at least for now, that’s not an option.

There’s also a handy plug-in you can add to the browser to help manage your OpenID credentials on sites that support the single sign-on technology.

One glaring omission — the lack of good tools for FriendFeed. To be fair, though, FriendFeed started getting popular only very recently, so we should see more tools in the next Flock update.

I’ll admit that every time I test Flock I’m amazed by the amount of social tools it offers. But, in the end, I make my way back to Firefox to get real work done. Still, if you spend all or most of your time on social networking sites, Flock is one of the few tools that connects the social web in a way that, for the most part, just works.

Plus, it’s built on Firefox, so you get the best of both worlds — a great browser and great tools for the social web.

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File Under: Uncategorized
May
18
2009

Facebook Opens Up to OpenID

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Facebook users can now log in to the website using their Gmail accounts, the company announced Monday.

The social network has become an OpenID relying party, following through on a promise it made at a developer event last month. Starting Monday afternoon, Facebook will support login credentials supplied by any OpenID provider that supports “automatic login.”

So, for example, if you’re already logged in to Gmail when you visit Facebook.com, you’ll be given the option to automatically log in to your Facebook account with one click.

Accounts for Google services, like Gmail, as well as providers like OpenID.net, can be used to sign in to Facebook. MySpace, Yahoo and AOL credentials cannot be used, as those companies currently don’t support the automatic login method Facebook is implementing.

Regular Facebook users now have a more secure way of logging in to the site (one less username and password to remember), but the bigger win is what this change will mean for new user adoption.

For Gmail users, the process of “finding friends” is effectively over.

When a new user logs in to Facebook using their Gmail address, the system is able to kick start the networking experience for them. You have a tremendous amount of friend data stored in your Gmail account in the form of your friends’ names and e-mail addresses.

When you authenticate, Google tells you what data Facebook is requesting. See the screenshot above and you’ll see “Google Contacts” on the list. So, after you authenticate, Facebook gains the permission it needs to tap into that list of contacts, find out which of your friends are using Facebook and suggest that you connect with them.

In a statement on the Facebook developer blog, engineer Luke Shepard says:

In tests we’ve run, we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.

It may seem odd that Facebook is being so forward thinking about supporting a portable data standard like OpenID, especially given the company’s history of clamping down on sharing users’ activity data outside of its network in the name of privacy. But this is the kind of data sharing that works in Facebook’s advantage — it eases adoption, simplifies the process of building networks, and increases activity on Facebook.

Furthermore, Facebook has been forward-thinking about ID in general, both with the launch of Facebook Connect and its involvement in the OpenID Foundation. The company’s dedication to making authentication as simple as possible is evidenced by its requirement that an OpenID provider must support “automatic login” — Facebook wants the login experience to meet a very high standard of usability, and only providers who support immediate authentication will be able to play along.

Hopefully, Facebook’s high expectations are a driving force within the industry, and that Monday’s move pushes other OpenID providers to improve their implementations of the emerging standard.

File Under: Events, Software & Tools
May
18
2009

Mozilla Design Challenge: Reinvent Tabbed Browsing

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Summer is approaching, and with it, the next phase of Mozilla Labs’ Design Challenge. This time around, the challenge is to reinvent Firefox’s tabbed browsing interface.

The Labs Design Challenge series kicked off earlier this year when Mozilla asked users to develop new ideas and prototypes for the future of the web browser. The first challenge asked students to answer the question, what would a browser look like if the Web was all there was?

The latest question for designers and visual mavens is: “how can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

A Slashdot post on the design challenge makes it sound like Mozilla is thinking of ditching the tabbed browsing interface, but that’s a bit premature. Rather, the idea seems to be: how can tabbed browsing be improved?

If you’re like us, you probably have dozens of tabs open at any given time and, while tabbed browsing may not be broken, it does have its shortcomings. For example, the more tabs you open, the less screen real estate each gets — open enough and you won’t even be able to tell what websites are open in your background tabs.

Is there a better way? That’s exactly what the Design Challenge hopes to discover.

This isn’t the first time Mozilla has turned its design focus to tabs. Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, recently showed off a design mockup of what tabs might look like in the sidebar. There are already some Firefox extensions that can put your tabs in the sidebar, but Raskin’s version is a bit more like an application menu than just a list of tabs.

Instead of simple tabs, Raskin’s mockup envisions grouping things into frequently used web applications (for example your webmail page, an online office suite, etc), more traditional list of tabbed sites and then a workspace-switching section, allowing you to move between groups of related tabs — one group for work, one for the websites related to the vacation you’re planning, and so on.

But that’s just one possibility. Firefox users likely have their own pet ideas, and hopefully we’ll get to see some of the possibilities when the Design Challenge results come in later this year.

If you’d like to participate, all you need to do is create a mockup and accompanying video explaining how it works. Upload your video to Vimeo, YouTube or the like and tag it with “mozconcept.” Also be sure to let Mozilla Labs know about your entry by sending an e-mail to conceptseries@mozilla.com.

The submission deadline is June 21 2009 and the “Best in Class” and “People’s Choice” awards will be announced July 8 2009.

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File Under: Software & Tools
May
18
2009

Early Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 Leaked to Torrent Sites

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Microsoft has released an early build of Office 2010 to a select group of testers, and, inevitably, Microsoft’s next office suite has already leaked out onto the web and is now burning up a torrent tracker near you.

If torrents of pre-beta software aren’t your bag, the official way to get your hands on a copy of the Office 2010 Technical Preview is to registered with Microsoft and hope that you’re one of the lucky few selected to receive the Preview release in July 2009.

So what’s new in Office 2010? Judging by the leaked screenshots posted by our friends over at Ars Technica, the Ribbon interface is now universal and the overall UI seems more polished. Perhaps the biggest change is that the orb, the button menu in the Ribbon (at the far left of the Ribbon) is reportedly no longer a menu. Rather, it pops up a small overlay window with all the same options.

Some applications have changed names. Groove, a collaboration component of Office 2007, will now be known as SharePoint Workspace, and both SharePoint and the popular OneNote component will be part of the Office Professional Plus release.

Office 2010 will run on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. If you upgrade to Windows 7, Office applications will integrate nicely with the new taskbar, allowing you to create new calendar appointments and add new contacts directly from the taskbar.

If you decided to give the leaked torrents a try, be sure to let us know what you think.

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File Under: Visual Design, Web Basics
May
15
2009

Google’s New Design Helps Eliminate OpenID Confusion

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Google has announced two important changes to its OpenID API. The first is new a popup window interface with fewer redirects and a much streamlined experience for users. The second change is that sites now have access to more data like your first and last name, preferred language, country, and more (assuming you allow the site in question to access that data).

It’s no secret that OpenID is confusing for many users. Because OpenID isn’t owned by any one company, websites supporting OpenID can implement it in very different ways, and often the OpenID experience lacks the simplicity and UI polish of alternatives like Facebook Connect.

Google’s revamped interface and workflow are designed to address common problems with OpenID and make the user experience easier.

As OpenID advocate David Recordon writes on the OpenID blog, the new streamlined interface means that users signing into sites “now have a much better user experience, one on par with Facebook Connect.”

Google’s redesigned OpenID interface and workflow isn’t just something the company worked out on its own, it’s actually part of the OpenID User Interface Extension Specification, which is an attempt to standardize and refine the OpenID user experience.

The good news for users is that the recommendations in the UI Spec are catching on with OpenID providers — JanRain, another OpenID provider has also announced a similar overhaul for its OpenID interface and API.

Of course, while it may seem obvious to those who use it, the new Google OpenID interface does not replace to older method and converting a site use the new interface is left up to the site’s developers. If you’d like to see an example of the new interface, head over to UserVoice, which has already integrated the new system.

While it’s nice to see UserVoice jumping on the new interface and making the experience a little smoother, if you click through to the site you’ll see another problem with web identity — there’s seven ways to login to the site.

While we like choice when it comes to using the web, at some point choice overwhelms users — what do you do if, like us, you have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, an OpenID identity and a Yahoo identity? Which one do you choose?

Quite frankly, it’s a mess. And the problem isn’t unique to UserVoice, even logging in to leave a comment on a blog is becoming a study in the who’s who of web identity providers.

The original idea was that there would be a single identity — your OpenID. But of course that’s not how it worked out. Just about every site on the web wants to be your identity provider and figuring out which one you should choose is hard for less web-savvy users.

If the history of the web is any indicator, eventually one of these identity providers will end up the de facto choice for most users. But in the mean time, while OpenID is improving, the larger problem of where to host your identity remains.

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File Under: Software & Tools
May
15
2009

Firefox 3.5 RC1 on Track for Early June Release

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FirefoxThe first release candidate of Firefox 3.5 is scheduled to arrive the first week of June. In a note to the Firefox developer’s mailing list, Mike Beltzner, Firefox product lead, says Mozilla plans to freeze the code for RC1 next week and hopes to have the release candidate out to testers by the first week of June.

Firefox 3.5 originally planned as a minor update to arrive in December 2008 (it was to be labeled 3.1). However, numerous delays, many of them coming from the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, and the significantly larger scope of new features prompted Mozilla to push back the release date and bump the version number to better reflect the significance of the upgrade.

Among the new features in Firefox 3.5 are the enhanced JavaScript rendering engine to speed up web apps, an improved session restore tool and a private browsing mode (commonly known as “porn mode”) that eschews local page caching on a per-session basis. These were added largely in response to similar features that popped up in Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, both of which were released while the latest Firefox was still in the early development stages.

According to the Mozilla bug tracker there are 52 “blockers” — Mozilla’s term for major, known bugs — standing between developers and the release candidate. That might sound like a lot, but Beltzer is upbeat, telling developers that “the finish line is very much in sight.”

Mozilla has not set a firm date for the final release of Firefox 3.5, though in the past the time between a release candidate and the final version is typically four to six weeks — if all goes well, look for Firefox 3.5 to arrive sometime in July 2009.

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