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Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5

By Michael Calore November 4, 2009 Categories: Web Basics


SANTA CLARA, California — The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.

“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, taking place here this week.

HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.

“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.

HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process data, which has led to the creation of more complex and rich web applications that run in the browser like Gmail, Facebook and apps that allow real-time data sharing, like Google Wave.

“Yes, this is a markup language for web pages,” he says, “but the really big shift that’s happening here — and, you could argue, what’s actually driving the fancy features — is the shift to the web becoming a client-side computing platform.”

The HTML5 specification is close to completion. The most recent releases of browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support most of the technologies being rolled in to HTML5. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer supports fewer of HTML5’s advancements, but it’s catching up. HTML5 is expected to become an official recommendation by late 2010 or 2011.

Now that the web has been elevated to a more powerful computing platform by HTML5, Berners-Lee says it has also given rise to complicated security issues.

“You got a piece of code from site A, and you’re person B running a browser you got from company C, and that code wants to access data stored with company E for the purposes of printing it on a printer owned by company D — How do you build that so that it’s not susceptible to all kinds of nasty attacks?”

“The technology is very exciting, but there’s actually a lot of work to do in these corridors to make it work on the real web in a secure way.”

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Discover Cool Photo Apps With Flickr’s New ‘App Garden’

By Scott Gilbertson November 4, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Everyone has an app store these days. But of course, for Flickr, the photo sharing site that brought you rainbow vomiting Panda Bears, “store” is far too pedestrian. Which is why Flickr has launched a new App Garden.

The new Flickr App Garden consists of mobile, desktop, and online widgets that interact with Flickr and help you get more out of the site. Flickr already had an extensive list of such apps in its “Services” area, but the new App Garden is considerably simpler and makes find cool Flickr apps much easier.

Unlike the former app directory, which was a simple list, Flickr’s App Garden gives each app its own page where users can leave comments, tag apps and mark them as favorites. The ability to favorite an app means users now have a way to promote their favorites in the App Garden showcase. The app pages also look and feel just like a Flickr photo pages, which makes App Garden feel more like a part of Flickr than the old services directory ever did.

To make it even easier to discover cool apps, Flickr has also included tags on user’s photos which tell you what app the image was uploaded with, and then link back to that app in the new App Garden. If you don’t want others to know how you upload your photos, you can turn off the new tags in your account settings.

The result is that you can stumble across some very cool stuff like Suggestify, an app that allows you to geotag other people’s photos by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Following the tag “geotag” then led us to an interesting iPhone app, FlickrUp, which lets you geotag photos uploaded from the iPhone.

So far there’s no way for developers to charge for applications through the Flickr App Garden, though there are some non-free apps listed. Since actually download the apps you want — whether free or not — requires at trip to the developer’s own page, it seems that, at least for now, the App Garden is more a place to browse, not buy apps.

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Same as it Ever Was: The History of HTML is a Conversation, Not a Spec

By Scott Gilbertson November 3, 2009 Categories: Programming, Web Basics

Developer Mark Pilgrim has posted a fascinating look at how the HTML img tag came into existence. The history Pilgrim digs up — mailing list conversations between the creators of the first web browsers like Marc Andreessen and the webs early pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee — show that far from being a carefully planned specification, the lingua franca of the web evolved a bit like the early universe — out of a murky chaos.

That from the chaos we got a workable — some would argue good — solution for creating the web is proof on some level that conversations and not abstracts, proposals and design by committee are the key to HTML’s success.

As Pilgrim writes:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction.

You might be wondering, why did img succeed where other proposals, like an include or an icon tag failed? The answer is simple, because Marc Andreessen shipped code — Netscape Navigator — while those backing the other proposals, for most part, did not.

Of course that doesn’t mean that just shipping code is always good plan. Shipping code before a standard doesn’t necessarily produce the best solutions, as Pilgrim says. Or, put another way by a commentator on Pilgrim’s post, “shipping doesn’t mean you win, but not shipping means you lose.”

From those who shipped without the official blessing of a standard, we’ve come to have an img tag, the basis for AJAX, all of the HTML5 tools available in browsers today and much more.

Critics of HTML’s disorganized evolution will be quick to note that we’ve also come to have the blink tag, cross-browser rendering issues and other pains of web development.

Indeed we’re not suggesting that shipping features without at least engaging in the conversation is a good idea, but, when it comes to the future of HTML, if browser makers don’t ship HTML5 features before the standard is official we’ll be waiting until 2022 to use the new tools.

But while the future of HTML5 might be moving at a rather slow and convoluted pace. Pilgrim’s post is reminder that HTML has always progressed that way.

Perhaps the truly remarkable part is that, for all its flaws and convoluted evolution the core tech behind the web remains essentially the same now as it was then. “HTML is an unbroken line… a twisted, knotted, snarled line, to be sure… but still… Here we are, in 2009, and web pages from 1990 still render in modern browsers.”

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Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Arrives: More Speed, Better Video, New Tab Tricks

By Scott Gilbertson November 2, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Mozilla has unleashed the first beta release of Firefox 3.6, the next version of the popular open-source browser.

On the surface, it looks like incremental performance upgrade from the current version, Firefox 3.5, which was released in June. But anyone spending a great deal of time in JavaScript-heavy web apps — which these days is most of us — will notice faster page loads thanks to improvements to the browser’s rendering engine. This new beta also has better support for the latest emerging web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, better native video playback, a new plugin updating mechanism and some new tab behaviors.

If you’d like to test Firefox 3.6 beta 1, head over to the Mozilla downloads site and grab a copy. The final version is set to arrive sometime before the end of 2009. The relatively short six-month wait between upgrades is evidence of Mozilla’s promise to speed up its release schedule.Mozilla has slightly tweaked the way beta releases work. Now, if you download the beta, it will automatically upgrade to the release candidate, then the final release when it arrives.

One of the first things you’ll notice in the new beta is the performance boost. Firefox 3.6 features some tweaks to TraceMonkey, Mozilla’s own engine for rendering JavaScript on web pages . The new version of TraceMonkey in this release has been optimized to work within Firefox, meaning that, not only is TraceMonkey being used to speed up web apps, it’s now available to speed up Firefox UI elements written in JavaScript. That change should make the Firefox interface slightly snappier, and when combined with the new version of Gecko, Firefox’s core rendering engine, expect to some noticeable improvements in Firefox’s performance.

Mozilla hasn’t made any specific claims of speed boosts in Firefox 3.6, but in our testing, JavaScript-heavy sites like FriendFeed, Facebook and Gmail loaded faster, and the browser’s initial start-up time was much better than with Firefox 3.5 (especially if you’re reopening a large number of tabs).

But as with previously releases, Firefox loves to gobble up RAM. Perhaps not as much as pre-3.0 releases, but 3.6 still demands more overhead than Safari and Opera on our Macbook Pro.

The full screen support for native video embeds, which we told you about earlier this year, has arrived with the new beta. Just right click a video embedded using the HTML5 video tag and you’ll see a new menu item for full screen playback.

On the user interface front, the default tab behavior has been tweaked slightly. Opening a link by CMD-clicking now places the new tab right next to the currently open tab. That’s a significant change from previous versions, where the default behavior was to open new tabs at the far right side of the current window. Indeed if you just open a blank tab, it will be placed on the far right, but opening a link in a new tab will not.

Quite frankly, we found the new behavior frustrating and confounding — so much so that we’re unsure whether to call it a feature or a bug. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get the old behavior back: head toabout:config and change the tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent setting to false.

Note: See Wired’s How-To Wiki entry on customizing Firefox 3.6 to add your own tips.

Also new on the tab front are the long-awaited preview thumbnails in Firefox’s built-in tab switcher, which have finally arrived — sort of. The tab previews have been in the works for quite some time and sadly, enabling the previews will still require a trip to about:config (set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true). Hopefully, by the time the final release arrives, preview icons on Firefox’s tab switcher will be turned on by default.

Firefox’s new tab-switching interface. Click the image for a larger view.

Firefox 3.6 beta 1 also supports Windows 7’s Aero Peek tab previews — the page and tab previews available in the Windows 7 task bar. As with other Win 7 apps, hovering your mouse over Firefox’s task bar icon will pop up previews of all your Firefox windows and tabs, making it quicker and easier to navigate between them.

Firefox 3.6 beta 1 brings built-in support for lightweight themes, which Mozilla calls Personas. Personas has been around for a while (you can even sync them through Weave), but previously installing Personas required a separate extension to manage them.

As of the new beta, Personas can be installed right out of the box, allowing you to tweak and theme Firefox as you’d like. Although Personas don’t offer quite the options of a full fledged theme, they’re much easier to create and install. If you’d like to try out some custom themes, head over to the Persona site.

The beta also features a new plug-in update mechanism which will warn you when, for example, your Flash plug-in is out of date and possibly vulnerable to attack.

Also new under the hood is the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) support we mentioned last month, as well as the new about:support page which offers a simple place to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list off installed extensions, any user-modified preference setting, links to installed plug-ins and other configuration details.

Read the full release notes if you want to see more about the nitty gritty bits.

As with any beta Firefox release, don’t expect all your favorite extensions to work right now. In our testing, Ad Block Plus and Weave were the only of our half dozen extensions that worked out of the box. You can help out add-on developers by grabbing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, which will run all your extensions even if they haven’t been updated. Any resulting bugs or strange behaviors can be easily reported to the developers through the Add-ons Manager.

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Google Groups Fail: JQuery Dumps Google Over Spam, Interface Problems

By Scott Gilbertson October 29, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Much of Google’s success rests on the fact that the words “Google” and “suck” rarely appear in the same sentence.

There is one notable exception: Google Groups, which lately has started to look more and more like an abandoned service. The mailing-list and discussion-board service has remained short on features since Google launched it in 2001. Meanwhile, Groups has become overwhelmed with spam, and one the most popular Google Groups — the JQuery mailing list, with more than 20,000 members — is jumping ship.

John Resig, the lead developer of JQuery, a popular JavaScript Library for developing complex web applications, recently posted a sharply critical look at Google Groups.

“As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead,” he writes.

Resig isn’t the only one with problems. Google Groups began life as a way to rescue the Deja.com Usenet archive, but as our Epicenter blog recently reported, the Usenet portion of Google Groups is fundamentally broken. Google has since addressed some problems highlighted in that piece, but even newly created groups, like the JQuery group, feel neglected and overrun with spam.

While Resig is careful to note that Google Groups remains a workable optionfor private mailing lists, but for large public mailing lists like JQuery, Google Groups’ inability to combat spam, its poor moderator tools and general neglect have made the platform unusable.

“The problem mostly lies in the use cases that we’re trying to support,” Resig says in an e-mail to Webmonkey. “We need to support people who are actively trying to help new users, and we also need to support people who just want a simple question answered.” Spam, awkward filtering tools and a lack of support have driven JQuery to look elsewhere for a platform that connects its users, he says.

From an end-user point of view, the problem might not be immediately noticeable, especially if you’re using a good e-mail client which can filter out the spam for you. However, it can be a bit shocking to visit your favorite Groups’ homepage and discover it’s been overrun by spammers.

While Gmail is good at filtering spam, Google Groups is so bad, it’s almost as if the company isn’t even trying. There is a moderation option, which helps a bit. For example, compare the Django Users Group homepage (which uses moderation) to the EveryBlock Group (which doesn’t use moderation). As you can see, there isn’t one legitimate message on the Everyblock Group homepage, while there’s hardly any spam in the Django Group.

Sadly, as Resig points out, moderation makes joining and posting to a Google Group much more complex for the first-time users who have come seeking help, and the tools provided for moderators aren’t nearly as slick as you’d expect from a Google product.

Compounding the problem, spammers have figured out that spoofing e-mail addresses works swimmingly in Google Groups. So even with moderation turned on, spam will inevitably get through. Even worse, it’ll look like it came from legitimate list members, or even the moderators. In the end, the moderators have to moderate their own e-mail addresses to truly stop Google Groups spam.

Resig tells Webmonkey that JQuery is still looking for a suitable replacement for Google Groups. The top contenders are Vanilla Forums, which allows people to subscribe to all new posts and comments by e-mail, and Stack Exchange, which is essentially Stack Overflow customized for a specific topic.

Unfortunately, based on Resig’s account, it looks like Google’s Data Liberation Front hasn’t trained its data-export vision on Groups just yet — there is no way to export all the messages from a Group (there is, however, the ability to export a list of all members). In the JQuery Group’s case, that means some 120,000 messages in the group will have to exported by hand.

As for the future of Google Groups, well, the handwriting might well be on the wall. As blogger and former Yahoo engineer Andy Baio points out, “If you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignored, watch for spam taking over.”

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Fennec Fits Everything You Love About Firefox Into Your Pocket

By Michael Calore October 29, 2009 Categories: Mobile, Software & Tools

A burning question that’s been tossed around for years — “Why isn’t Firefox on my phone?” — has finally been answered.

Firefox will begin showing up on mobile devices at the end of this year. I got the chance to test a beta version of Firefox on a pre-release mobile device. The browser, code-named Fennec, is the closest thing yet to a real, desktop-class browser for mobiles.

It does almost everything Firefox on the desktop does, and with the speed, stability and support for web standards one would expect from a browser branded with the Firefox name.

Last week, Wired.com received a Nokia N900 for review. The black, brick-style phone has a touchscreen and a physical keyboard. It runs Maemo, Nokia’s operating system based on Debian Linux, and Maemo has its own, dedicated build of Fennec. I installed Fennec for Maemo Beta 4, the latest stable release, and spent a few days surfing with it.

All the features that endear us to Firefox — tabbed browsing, the smart URL bar, easy bookmarking and history management, spellchecker, password manager, an innovative user interface — are present and working properly. There are still some sticky bugs, but it’s already very usable.

While the mobile web of just a few years ago was clunky, slow and unsatisfying, today’s mobile web is a whole new bag. The iPhone’s Mobile Safari and Google’s Android browser (both based on the same open source WebKit engine), along with the Opera Mobile browser are feature-rich tiny machines. Mobile bandwidth is still limited, but fast enough and getting faster. Cities are blanketed in Wi-Fi hotspots. Flash support is incomplete, but improving quickly. Most of us can see the light at the end of the tunnel when we won’t need the desktop for all but the most serious tasks.

Mozilla has remained largely absent from this revolution until now. Firefox will first be made available for devices running Windows Mobile and Maemo. Later, a version is expected for Android. There won’t be a version of Firefox for the BlackBerry, for Symbian or for the iPhone any time soon, (Mozilla execs get asked the iPhone question all the time, and their answer is always the same — Apple’s restrictions on the device are too tight for Mozilla’s browser to be able to function properly).

Performance is what this browser will be judged on, and at least on the N900, the Fennec team should expect high marks. Pages load very quickly and I encountered few rendering problems in my tests. I hit all my usual destinations: Gmail, Google Reader, Craigslist, Wired, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Of course, I followed scores of links out to other sites.

Since it’s built on the same code as Firefox (actually, it’s based on Firefox 3.6 code, which hasn’t even made it to the desktop yet), Fennec has excellent support for web standards, Ajax, microformats and for advanced CSS layouts. Flash support is coming soon. The latest nightly builds have it, but it’s buggy — Mozilla’s QA blog notes there are syncing issues with audio and video. The beta I used didn’t have Flash capability.

The N900’s screen is touch-sensitive, so double-tapping on an image or paragraph of text zooms in cleanly without a page refresh. You can see the page element get sharper as you zoom in — just like the iPhone’s browser. Text flows cleanly around images and hardly ever spills out of bounding boxes.

One notable flaw in Fennec is that words often appear a little crushed. Most sites I visited showed kerning and letter spacing issues (Wired.com is one example). On a few sites (like Craigslist) text showed up perfectly fine. Results varied on the rest. These inconsistencies are probably due to a combination of the text styling the website author has chosen and the fact that most sites don’t yet know what to do with Fennec’s user-agent string — the bit of code identifying it as a mobile browser. Websites will serve mobile-optimized sites to mobile browsers, which is why you’ll sometimes get redirected to a different URL or served bigger text when you hit some websites with your iPhone or BlackBerry.

Fennec is such an unknown entity on the web that most sites don’t know it’s a mobile browser. Leading up to launch, we’ll see more sites recognizing it for what it is — a browser running on a tiny screen.

One fix is to install an add-on that lets you change the user-agent string and impersonate a more widely-used mobile browser (this is called “spoofing”), but such an add-on doesn’t exist yet. Visiting the page for the most popular user-agent spoofer for Firefox shows at least one fan has already requested a Fennec version.

Thankfully, Fennec’s page-rendering problems are largely contained to text kerning and spacing. But it gets worse when you zoom in. There’s already a bug report filed for the kerning issues, and they should be fixed before 1.0 arrives.

The only other notable problem is page sluggishness when scrolling. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the page is fully loaded, whether it’s weighed down with JavaScript, or whether you’re using the keypad or your finger. Fennec is an equal-opportunity page sluggifier.

One Mozilla engineer I e-mailed says the team has been trying to get rid of one of the browser’s visual tics — a slight, side-to-side “jitter” that sometimes happens when you place your finger on the screen to drag it — and that the fix they’ve applied has inadvertently caused the sluggishness to show up in this beta. It should improve in the next beta release.

Beyond performance, the next most critical ingredient for a browser is a well-designed user interface. Fennec has one.

Just as with Firefox’s “Awesome bar,” the Fennec address bar does triple-duty — it’s a URL bar, a Google search box and a history and bookmarks search tool. Results are suggested as you type, and on the N900, it’s snappy.

Swiping the page left or right exposes two additional banks of controls. Swipe to the right and you get a tab manager. It shows thumbnails of all your open browser tabs and a big plus sign you use to open a new tab.

Swipe to the left and you get forward and back controls, the Star button to mark a page as a favorite and a button that brings up the Settings panel.

Hiding these elements just beyond the edges of the page saves as much screen real estate as possible for the web page itself without sacrificing the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from a modern browser. It’s an innovative twist.

Inside the Settings panel you get an add-on manager, a downloads manager, a control panel for toggling how Fennec handles scripts and images by default. (Look closely — the description for the “Enable JavaScript” box says “Makes websites flashy” and the one for “Enable Plug-ins” says “Makes websites annoying.”) This panel is also where you can choose to save passwords or cookies and where you clear your browser cache.

There are a few Fennec add-ons to be found at addons.mozilla.org/mobile. The best ones to try right now are GeoGuide, which shows photos, events and weather for your current location, and Mozilla’s own Weave, which syncs your bookmarks, history, passwords, and tabs between Fennec and your desktop versions of Firefox.

Mobile Firefox will be the first mobile browser with a real add-on architecture. That’s exciting, but there still aren’t very many add-ons for Fennec available. The release candidate stage (once it’s out of beta) is when many Firefox add-on authors will complete the process of adapting their desktop versions to work with Fennec. Meanwhile, Mozilla is waving the start flag — Thursday’s issue of its about:mobile newsletter is aimed squarely at mobilizing mobile add-on developers.

With GeoGuide and Weave installed, Fennec is remarkably stable. In three days of testing, Fennec didn’t crash once, and this is pre-release software. I can’t say the same about Mobile Safari, which has been around for a couple of years and still crashes at least once or twice per day.

Even though they’re not perfect, the Webkit browsers for the iPhone and Android have set expectations very high for mobile browsers. Scrolling on multi-touch devices like the iPhone and the new Droid is smooth and intuitive. There are a slew of new Android phones coming out this fall, and enhancements to the Android’s browser in the recent Eclair release give it new abilities. It includes support for multi-touch screen gestures, native video playback and expanded support for HTML5 elements that make JavaScript-heavy websites like Gmail and Facebook faster and more comfortable to use.

This is the arena Fennec will be entering when it’s released later this year. At this stage, it looks like it will be a success — at least on devices where it actually runs.

Note: We couldn’t get the N900 to take good screenshots, so the screenshots shown here are from a Maemo emulator running on Mac OS X.

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Android Gets a Better Browser, Now With More HTML5

By Michael Calore October 27, 2009 Categories: Mobile, Operating Systems


Android got a boost Tuesday when Google announced its Android SDK now supports version 2.0 of the open-source platform for mobiles.

There’s a whole mess of new features in Android 2.0 (aka “Eclair”) but the big news for Webmonkeys is the enhanced WebKit-powered browser.

The Android browser gets an updated UI — tap the address bar for instant searches, double-tap to zoom in on content wells — and better bookmarks that incorporate thumbnail images of the pages.

Also included is support for several of HTML5’s APIs for building next-gen web apps: the Geolocation API, the Database API for managing client-side SQL databases and data caching support for offline application access.

There’s also support for HTML5’s <video> tag — the browser can play videos in fullscreen mode without plug-ins.

Read about the enhancements at the Android Developers blog, where the Eclair update was announced. There’s also a page listing all the highlights found within.

And there’s this sexy video:

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Google Social Search Adds Your Friends to Your Search Results

By Scott Gilbertson October 27, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools, social

Google has added a new social-search tool to its experimental search options.

Google Social Search, which went live Monday afternoon, finds results from your social network, pulls a list of your contacts from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and other social networks, as well as your Gmail contacts, to find results for search terms from people you know.

Facebook’s friend data isn’t shared publicly, so results from your Facebook friends won’t show up unless you’re also friends on other networks.

To enable the new experiment, head over to the Google Experimental Search page and add the new Social Search option. As with other experiments, you’ll need to be logged in to Google to see the social results.

Once the experiment is enabled, you’ll be able to search for something like “potato chips” with enhanced results. Along with the regular Google results showing top hits for the entire web, you’ll see a link to a write-up about potato chips from your friend’s food blog, as well. You might also see a friend’s tweet about potato chips, or a link to a Yelp review written by somebody you know where they talked about how good the potato chips are at the Lulu Petite sandwich shop.

While Google’s intro video (embedded below) shows search results from the social tool inline with other results (under the heading “Results from people in your social circle…”) that didn’t happen in our testing. To see the personalized results from our social graph we had to click the “Options” button and then filter the results by “social.”

As for the results, well, Social Search leaves a little to be desired, but the results depend heavily on how large your social circle is and how closely your interests match your friends. For example, a search for “Webmonkey” turned up a number of hits, since the past and present Webmonkey staff members are part of our social graph. However, two of us have been passing around a link to a (NSFW) McSweeney’s article about decorative gourds Tuesday morning, but a social search for “decorative gourds” returned nothing from our social graph. We seem to be alone on that one.

It’s important to note that Google Social Search is not a real-time search engine. The quality of results may suffer a little if you’re searching for things that your friends have only started posting about very recently.

The quality of results will also depend on how many services you’ve added to your Google Profile — the more social sites Google knows you hang out on, the more friends it has to draw on, and thus the more results you’ll see.

The exclusion of Facebook may seem like an egregious oversight, but it comes amidst a very public battle between Google and Facebook to become your hub on the social web. The recent push behind Google Profiles was the search company’s first major attempt to create a central place for you to store information about yourself and link to your profiles on other social networks. But Facebook is still the more popular place to build a profile, and Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft last week to let the Bing search engine index user activity on the site — a deal Google was left out of.

Compared to using the search features on social sites themselves, like Twitter and FriendFeed, Google’s Social Search comes in a distant second. But it does offer the advantage of finding everything in one place. It also acts as a very welcome filter. Try searching for “Where the Wild Things Are” on Twitter, and you’ll see thousands of tweets from people commenting about the movie or the book. Run the same search in Google Social Search, and you’ll just see what your friends — and the people they chat with publicly — are saying.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is already available publicly on the web — with a bit of Google hacking you could find it yourself. But what’s social about that?

To see Social Search in action, check out this video from Google:


To enable Social Search, make sure you’re logged in to your Google account and head over to the Experimental Search page.

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New Facebook Features Show It’s Still Finding Its Real-Time Legs

By Michael Calore October 26, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, social

Facebook has made two major changes to the way it displays real-time data about user activity on its platform — one for publishers to help track the spread viral content, and one change that affects how people see updates from their friends.

The site has enhanced its Share feature — the tiny “Share this on Facebook” widgets seen at the bottom of blog posts, videos and photos — to include live stats tracking. Starting Monday, publishers can see a live count of how many times a particular post or piece of media has been shared on Facebook.

The new live stats counter for Facebook Share closely mimics Tweetmeme’s popular “Retweet” badges, or the live widgets that show the number of Diggs or up-votes on Reddit a piece of content has accumulated.

Facebook Share is getting some analytics tools, too. In addition to learning how many times Facebook users have shared a post, publishers can also see whenever somebody “likes” the shared post, leaves a comment, or clicks back to the original site from within Facebook.

It’s not the only tweak to Facebook’s real-time data flow the company has made to its site within the last few days.

On Friday, the Facebook home page for logged-in users was redesigned to show a filtered stream of updates. Rather than just showing a stream of every status update, every post and every “like” from within their network, Facebook users can now choose between a streamlined, filtered view and a raw, unfiltered view.

This change basically incorporates the old “Highlights” feed — the most important posts from your friends — into the main News Feed. The result is a stream of the most interesting or important stuff that’s been posted within the past couple of days.

click for largerThe new filtered News Feed is now the default. The more times a post is commented on or liked, the more “popular” it becomes. An algorithm determines what goes into the feed and what stays hidden. The old “Highlights” box is being removed, as it’s now redundant.

The Live Feed, which can be accessed by clicking on the new “Live Feed” tab at the top of the home page, gives a more immediate, Twitter-like stream. It displays all of the recent activity, posts and updates from you and your friends, regardless of popularity.

The odd thing here is that one of these changes brings Facebook up to speed with its competitors in the real-time content sharing game, while the other change sets it back.

Publishers want to know how their content is doing out in the wild, so the new Share tools make sense.

But in altering the News Feed in the way it has, Facebook actually becomes less of a real-time news source for its users. By adding popularity filters, important stuff might not bubble up into your News Feed for hours or days. I just looked at my News Feed, and the newest item is four hours old. If I really want to know what my friends are doing, reading, liking and talking about right now, I have to switch over to the Live Feed. Luckily, this is as easy as one mouse click.

But what does this say about the proliferation of real-time data streams on the web? Publishers always want better real-time data, but do users? Are regular people by and large tired of the massive firehose of updates their favorite sites now all offer? Is it all becoming just too much?

If so, Facebook made the right move with the News Feed changes. If not, hey, there’s always the Live Feed option one click away. Or there’s Twitter. And if you want a real-time stream you can filter even more minutely, you can turn to FriendFeed or Cliqset or Plaxo Pulse.

If the changes to Facebook’s stream bothers you — and judging from the comments of my own Facebook friends, the changes aren’t being seen as that friendly — they are easy to alter. Facebook Insider has an excellent post showing how to change your feed settings. Additional tips are in the comments.

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Xkcd Redesign Pays Homage to GeoCities, Which Dies Today

By Michael Calore October 26, 2009 Categories: Business, Humor

Web comic xkcd is sporting a fresh redesign Monday morning, paying tribute to the free web-hosting service GeoCities. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for $3.5 billion dollars, is shutting down the service today after ten years of stewardship.

GeoCities was a place anyone could start a website for free. The company sold cheap banner advertising against your content, but that didn’t matter — you finally had a place to post that Melissa Joan Hart fanpage or your fully-annotated Art Alexakis discography.

In the web’s early days, you actually had to know how to author a web page in order to publish anything on the internet. You had to have working knowledge of things like HTML, FTP, GIF and DNS. For people with these new-found skills, a GeoCities page was an essential first step into the web, a rite of passage. Next came the easy authoring tools like Dreamweaver and Blogger, then the social networks like Friendster and MySpace, which let anyone establish a web presence with a few clicks of the mouse. GeoCities, along with other free hosting communities like Angelfire, faded into obscurity.

Many of those early pages survived in all their gaudy, glitzy glory — complete with scrolling banners, animated Gifs and blink tags.

Until Monday, October 26, 2009. Rest in peace, GeoCities.

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