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Google Update Now a Scheduled Task, But Still Evil

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

Google has released a slight revision of its Google Update software for Windows. The latest version eliminates the need for Update to run constantly in the background — one of several reasons we’ve previously labeled the software “evil” — but stops short of conforming to the best practices of software updating.

Instead of running constantly in the background, consuming resources and creating a potential security vulnerability, Google Update now runs as a scheduled task.

Google Update has also been changed to allow some control over when it runs. The default is for Update to check with Google’s servers once an hour, but if you dig into the Windows Task Scheduler you can change that interval and even disable it altogether. However, according the Google Open Source Blog, tinkering with the update interval might cause Google Update to revert to its always-on status.

“When Google Update determines that the Windows Task Scheduler or Service mechanisms are not working as expected,” says the blog, “we have added in fallback mechanisms that cause Google Update to begin running as a continuous process again.”

So much for user control.

You might wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, what’s wrong with keeping your software up to date? Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with it, but Google’s Update software flies in the face of over 20 years of software best practices — there’s simply no need for desktop software to run update checks continuously, or even once an hour.

It’s not hard to see how Google views Update: it’s a way for it to have the constant update capabilities its web apps enjoy, but on your desktop. The problem is that while we accept that we can’t control the web, we most definitely can (and want to) control what happens on our laptops and PCs.

Or at least we could until Google decided we couldn’t.

The well-established practice of checking for updates when an application launches has been serving the industry — and some of its biggest names, like Adobe and Microsoft — well for for decades.

The latest version of Google Update is a baby-step in the right direction, but we still won’t be using Chrome, Google Earth or anything else that relies of Google Update until Google does the right thing.

The Mac version of Google update remains unchanged.

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EveryBlock Source Code Release Offers Glimpse of the Magic Behind the Curtain

By Scott Gilbertson July 2, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

EveryBlock, the local news aggregator that touts itself as a “news feed for your block,” has followed through on its much-anticipated source code release.

The local news site was founded two years ago by Adrian Holovaty, who is also one of the creators of the Django web development framework, which powers EveryBlock. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has operated on a grant from the Knight Foundation. The grant enabled EveryBlock to remain free of the pressures of venture capital funding and focus on experimenting with “micro local” news. The result of those experiments is a whole new way of looking at local news. We’re especially fond of the awesome EveryBlock iPhone app.

One of the stipulations in the Knight grant was that EveryBlock release its source code so that other sites can build on EveryBlock’s foundation.

For developers working with Django — a Python-based web framework — the new code provides a wealth of Django and geographic tools. It’s particularly interesting since much of it was written by Holovaty himself, one of the stars of Django development.

Of course, just because the code is not available to the public doesn’t mean you can drag-and-drop some files to your web server and create your own EveryBlock clone.

It would be nice if you could but, while the source code is a good starting point, much of EveryBlock’s success has nothing to do with its impressive source code. EveryBlock’s real success stems from the team’s ability to work with government officials to get access to the raw data and then organize it geographically.

If you’ve followed the EveryBlock blog at all, you’ll know that, sadly, local governments aren’t exactly forthcoming with their data. In fact, some seem downright hostile to the idea of sharing “their” data. The fact EveryBlock has been able to get access to data like building permits, crime stats and everything else on the site, is more a testimony to the group’s skills as bureaucratic negotiators than any Python tricks hidden up its sleeves.Still, having had a look at the EveryBlock source code, we can assure you there are indeed some very cool Python tricks in EveryBlock’s code — especially when it comes to working with geographic database extensions like GIS — and it will no doubt prove a gold mine for the Django community.

So what happens to EveryBlock.com, now that the grant money is gone? Holovaty writes on the EveryBlock blog that the site plans to continue as a private company, and he promises that the team still has some cool tricks to show off. “We have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience,” writes Holovaty, “we’re only getting started.”

If you’d like to see what sort of magic has been powering EveryBlock for the last two years, head on over to the new source code page and download the code. The code is broken down into several categories with tools ranging from the GIS tools to the data-acquisition modules and scripts. All of the code is available under the GPL 3.0.

One thing to keep in mind if you’re planning to develop some sort of EveryBlock site: The design and the name are not part of the release. In other words, your project can be inspired by EveryBlock, but don’t rip it off.

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W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5

By Michael Calore June 30, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Web Basics

The stewards of the web have removed the sections of the HTML 5 draft specification that would recommend web browsers support audio and video playback using a specific codec.

Ian Hickson, one of the primary authors of the HTML 5 draft at the Worldwide Web Consortium, made the announcement on the WHATWG mailing list Tuesday after fielding hundreds of e-mails’ worth of community comments over the past year and a half. Hickson cites the inability to reach a consensus on which codec should be implemented across all browsers as the primary reason for the decision.

The setback is sure to put a freeze on the main promise of open video and audio support in HTML 5 — the broad implementation of a single, plug-in free media playback environment in the next generation of web browsers, enabling people to watch movies and listen to songs inside the browser without having to download any additional software.

Hickson’s post, in part:

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML 5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship.

I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML 5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like <img> and image formats, <embed> and plugin APIs, or Web fonts and font formats.

The current situation is as follows:

  • Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.
  • Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
  • Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.
  • Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.
  • Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support <video> at all.

(Sorry if I’ve mischaracterised any positions above; the positions are relatively subtle and so it’s likely that I have oversimplified matters.)

I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn’t help get us true interoperability, since the people who are willing to implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people who aren’t are not going to be swayed by what the spec says.

Things are stuck in a stalemate, and, since the web’s main governing body is choosing to play it neutral and not push any vendors into support for one codec over the other, it’s unlikely there will be a quick resolution.

Others inside and outside the WHATWG have begun voicing their opinions.

Silvia Pfeiffer, an W3C invited expert and a member of Xiph.org, the non-profit group that oversees development of the Ogg media container, takes issue with Hickson’s last point, arguing that a strict requirement is a good thing:

Inclusion of a required baseline codec into a standard speaks more loudly than you may think. It provides confidence — confidence that an informed choice has been made as to the best solution in a given situation. Confidence to web developers, confidence to hosting providers, confidence also (but less so, since they are gatekeepers in this situation) to browser vendors.

In my opinion, including a baseline codec requirement into a W3C specification that is not supported by all Browser Vendors is much preferable over an unclear situation, where people are forced to gather their own information about a given situation and make a decision on what to choose based on potentially very egoistic and single-sided reasons/recommendations.

In fact, it is a tradition of HTML to have specifications that are only supported by a limited set of Browser Vendors and only over time increasingly supported by all — e.g. how long did it take for all browser vendors to accept CSS2, and many of the smaller features of HTML4 such as fixed positioning…

Sam Kuper, an open standards advocate and another W3C invited expert, backs up her argument:

Waiting for all vendors to support the specified codec would be like waiting for them all to be Acid3 compliant. Better to specify how browsers should behave (especially if it’s how most of them will behave), and let the stragglers pick up the slack in their own time under consumer pressure.

David Singer, a QuickTime engineer and Apple employee, also voiced his opinion, speaking on behalf of his team at Apple:

I just wanted to say that we’re not happy with the situation. We continue to monitor it, to take what action we can, and we continue to hope that we will, at some time, find a solution that reaches consensus.

It’s ironic that the announcement comes the same day as the release of the new version of Firefox, the second-most popular browser (behind Internet Explorer) which now ships with full native support for media playback using the Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs.

As for the future of video codecs on the web, Hickson sees a few possible outcomes, “all of which will take several years”:

1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple’s concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

When either of these happen, I will reconsider updating HTML5 accordingly.

Of course, the debate runs much deeper than what I’ve cited here. Follow along by reading the mailing list archives, which are available to the public.

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Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

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

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close.

The open-source browser is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

We’ve been using the latest betas and release candidates for the last few months. No matter what kind of web surfer you are, we recommend you download Firefox 3.5 as soon as you can. Here’s why.

A New Browser for a New Web
Much has changed in the year since Firefox 3 first hit the scene. Most significantly, Google Chrome arrived in September 2008, bringing with it support for many of the web’s latest technologies. Things like offline data access, geo-awareness and native video and audio playback were previously only glamor features — now that Google is highlighting the importance of those features, they’re must-haves. Chrome also came out of the gate showing off some extreme speed, and it spurred some friendly competition among browser makers to boost their speed of their apps. The latest versions of Safari and Opera showed large speed gains as a result.

Another reason browsers are getting faster is because websites are growing more complex. It’s not only social networks and media sharing sites that are responsible, but also productivity applications like e-mail, calendars and other office apps. These web destinations are behaving like full-blown applications, and they’re require more powerful, more nimble browsers.

Microsoft, which still commands the lion’s share of the browser market (see chart below), released a new version of Internet Explorer earlier this year. IE8 upped the ante when it comes to privacy, safety and usability features that are easy enough for consumers to grasp. It also got a speed boost.

So, Firefox, not even a year old, has a lot of catching up to do. Version 3.5 fills in the gaps admirably.


Browser market share as of May, 2009. Source: Net Applications

Speed
Firefox 3.5 has plenty of new features that make it worth the upgrade, but the real reason we love it so much is the massive speed gain. Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as its predecessor. While we haven’t been able to back up these claims reliably in our tests, and Chrome and Safari are still marginally faster than Firefox, you’ll definitely notice a big speed boost on JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail.

The faster performance is the result of the brand new TraceMonkey JavaScript Engine. According to Mozilla VP of Engineering Mike Shaver, the new tools in TraceMonkey allow JavaScript code to render on par with native code. That means the improved speed won’t just be in web apps. TraceMonkey will also improve add-on performance as well, since extensions and other Firefox tools are written in JavaScript.

Firefox 3.5 isn’t all about JavaScript, though. There have been plenty of changes in the latest version Gecko, the rendering engine that drives Firefox. These enhancements speed up page load times and enable Firefox 3.5 to take advantage of the latest code being used to build the next generation of web applications.

HTML 5
Though it won’t be finalized for at least another year, the specification for HTML 5 — the next revision of the markup language used to build websites — is already being implemented by the latest browsers. This new version of Firefox brings Mozilla’s browser up to speed with most recent releases by supporting many of the capabilities afforded by HTML 5.

The HTML 5 support in Firefox 3.5 allows for video and audio embeds without the need for the Flash plug-in. Right now, most video and audio playback on the web requires Adobe’s Flash Player. Even though it’s a free download, Mozilla thinks it’s too limiting to require a plug-in to watch videos and listen to songs, so it built those capabilities right into the browser. Now, website publishers can place a video into a web page just as they would a photograph or any other graphic, and it will play smoothly in Firefox 3.5 — no plug-in required.


Firefox 3.5 on the Mac desktop, playing a video encoded in Ogg Theora format. You can watch the video without needing to download any plug-ins if you have the latest version of Firefox.

Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner told Webmonkey that he hopes to eventually see this technology, which is powered by open-source technology called Ogg, replace proprietary solutions like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

“Six years from now, I think you’ll see Ogg video will have taken over the way that PNG has taken over from GIF,” he says.

The new browser also supports offline data storage and the <canvas> element for drawing vector graphics and animations. There are also some new CSS options that let designers create text with shadows and draw border images.

While you may not run across apps using these HTML 5 enhancements in the wild all that often right now, don’t expect that to last. Google is already developing sophisticated web apps that rely heavily on HTML 5 tools like offline data storage and native video embeds. Opera and Apple are also pushing HTML 5 into the web with Safari 4 and Opera 10, respectively.

Perhaps the most significant part of Firefox 3.5’s HTML 5 support (though one most people won’t notice) is the addition of “web workers,” a feature that will allow Firefox to run resource-intensive tasks in the background. While web workers features may not leap out and announce themselves the first time you launch Firefox 3.5, they do promise to make the browser snappier and more stable.

Geo-awareness
On the social web, where you are is almost as important as who you are and what you’re doing.

With Firefox 3.5, a web app that wants to know where you are can now just ask Firefox. Once you provide a web app with permission to do so (Firefox’s geolocation abilities are opt-in, as they should be), the application can use the browser to determine your location.

This means developers can provide more accurate local search results and other geo-aware functionality without the user having to install any special software or having to manually enter location data, like a ZIP code.

Google and Mozilla have partnered for Firefox’s geo-aware features — the underlying code will use Google’s Location Service as its default location provider. This is the same web service that powers all of Google’s geolocation applications, including Google Latitude and the location finder in Google Toolbar.

Search on Steroids
Firefox 3.0 introduced the world to the “Awesomebar,” the feature that turned the previously neglected URL bar into a powerful history and bookmark search tool. In fact, the idea was so compelling that Google’s Chrome browser launched with the very same feature.

The new Firefox 3.5 builds on the Awesomebar’s foundations adding sophisticated wildcard search tools for power users. For example, typing an asterisk limits results to your bookmarks and typing a pound sign (#) limits results to page titles (rather than titles and URLs).

Performance in the Awesomebar is also significantly improved, the occasional lag between when you start typing and when the first result shows up has been reduced to almost nil.

Privacy
Firefox 3.5 brings a much more robust private browsing mode that restricts the information your browser gathers as you visit websites. While surfing in private browsing mode, cookies are rejected, URLs are kept out of the browser history, forms are not auto-filled and pages are not cached. The result is a browser session that — from the browser’s point of view — never happened.

This is a sign that Firefox is taking a cue from the competition. Chrome, IE8 and Safari all have this feature. Although often referred to as “porn mode,” the privacy settings are actually very useful on public PCs, like those in internet cafes. As long as the PC is running a browser that has a private mode, you don’t need to worry about covering your tracks after the fact.

Welcome Small Changes
Among the most noticeable new features are the much-improved crash recovery system. Rather than a simple “restore/don’t restore” dialog, Firefox 3.5 will allow you selectively choose which windows and tabs to restore after a crash. That makes it considerably easier to isolate problem sites without losing your entire session. It isn’t as nice as Chrome’s isolated tabs feature, but Mozilla says that’s in the works for future releases of Firefox.

Another handy new feature is the ability to recover an accidentally closed window. While Firefox has long offered this feature for tabs, Firefox 3.5 builds on that to offer a way of recovering from errant mouse clicks that close an entire window.

Conclusion
Firefox 3.5 feels much more in tune with the way we expect our applications to behave on today’s web — it’s faster, smarter and more useful. And of course the story doesn’t end here. Mozilla is already prepping for the next release (the version number remains up in the air) which will, assuming all goes according to plan, offer isolated tabs for application crashes, integration of the Ubiquity add-on into the Awesome bar and of course, even more enhancements for HTML 5.

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Weave Update for Firefox Syncs Your Web Identity

By Scott Gilbertson June 29, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools

If you’re a Firefox user, you now have the ability to synchronize not only your bookmarks, browsing history and user preferences across multiple PCs — you can also sync your identity.

Mozilla has updated Weave, its free add-on for Firefox that lets you synchronize all your personal data across the various Firefox installations you have running on your work PC, your home PCs and your mobile phone. This latest update to Weave (now at version 0.4, which can be downloaded from Mozilla), builds in support for syncing online identities, including logins and passwords for your favorite websites, as well as support for OpenID logins at any website that utilizes them.

Once you’ve told Weave to keep track of your login data, the plug-in uses the stored identities to automatically log you into your favorite sites, in most cases requiring only a single click. Mozilla showed off Weaves’s new identity syncing features back in May when the company first announced that Weave would support OpenID.

The latest version of Weave also supports Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, which means you can easily transfer your desktop browsing sessions to your Fennec-compatible phone.

We’ve been using Weave since its debut and have found it a handy, if slightly flawed way to keep multiple instances of Firefox in sync. For example, when moving from PC to PC, Weave ensures you get the same results when you start typing into the Smart Location bar. Your most recent set of open browser tabs can be reproduced on multiple machines, as well. But despite a few updates, Weave’s potential — to totally sync every aspect of Firefox across computers — has remained largely untapped.

Fortunately the new Weave 0.4, which arrives just in time for Firefox 3.5’s debut, fills in most of the gaps in previous version and means that you can now maintain two essentially identical Firefox installations running on different computers. If you haven’t made the jump to OpenID yet, you can still take advantage of Weave, as this update includes a new auto-login feature that securely stores and syncs saved login forms across computers.

The new tools means that, not only are your various login credentials synced across computers, but signing in to virtually any site becomes a simple one-click process.

Of course, as with the rest of the things Weave syncs, you can turn off the auto-login syncing if you’d like.

Also new in the latest version of Weave is a support for syncing preference settings, but we should note that the preferences you’re able to sync are somewhat limited. For example, there’s still no support of syncing other Firefox add-ons or their settings.

However, the latest version of Weave sees a serious code rewrite behind the scenes, which Mozilla says should help pave the way for more features like the much requested add-on syncing. The rewritten code also means Weave is considerably faster, and there’s a new set of APIs so that other Firefox add-ons can tap into the power of Weave.

If you’d like to try out the latest version of Weave head over to the Mozilla Labs page and install the add-on. Note that Weave 0.4 requires the latest Firefox 3.5 beta.

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Firefox 3.5 Will Arrive June 30

By Michael Calore June 26, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Mozilla will release the next major version of Firefox on Tuesday, June 30, Webmonkey has learned. Mozilla confirmed the news Friday afternoon.

The company previously made a promise that it would make the browser available for download “by the end of June” this year. Since next Tuesday falls on the last day of the month, Mozilla is sticking to its word — just barely.

Firefox 3.5 is the first major revision of the popular open-source browser since version 3 landed a little over a year ago, in June of 2008. It features a faster rendering engine, stability enhancements and a new JavaScript engine that boosts the performance of most web-based applications. Firefox 3.5 will also include support for the most widely-used elements of HTML 5, the set of next-generation web standards that allows for offline data access, enhanced web graphics and multimedia playback without plug-ins.

Firefox 3.5 is currently in the post-beta release candidate stage. You can grab a preview release from Mozilla’s website if you can’t wait to download the final code on Tuesday.

Firefox is the browser of choice of between 20 and 25 percent of web surfers. It is second only to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which commands about 65 or 70 percent of the browser market. Browser share data is much disputed, based on who is doing the compiling.

If you’d like more information about Firefox 3.5 and what’s new, check out our links to previous coverage listed below, or head over to Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard’s blog. Blizzard is almost through with his 35 days project in which he highlights Firefox 3.5’s new features and even has some examples of how developers are taking advantage of the new tools to push the limits of the web.

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Movable Type Sings a New Song With ‘Melody’

By Scott Gilbertson June 26, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools

Movable Type, the publishing platform that has helped many a blogger move from a cookie-cutter hosted blog to a professional looking website, has a new addition to its family.

A group of Movable Type coders have launched Melody, a new version of Movable Type based on the publishing system’s open-source code base.

Of course there is already an open-source version of Movable Type available for anyone to hack on or modify as they see fit. Movable Type’s parent company, Six Apart, released a version of the blogging software under an open-source license in December 2007, while also continuing development of Movable Type as a commercial product. But so far, the open-source release hasn’t seen the sort of community following that similar projects — like Movable Type competitor, WordPress — have enjoyed.

That slow growth is what inspired the birth of the Melody project. Founded by some big names in the Movable Type community — like Byrne Reese, Jay Allen, Tim Appnel, some of whom have worked for Six Apart — the group hopes to revamp the open-source portion of Movable Type to build a more innovation-focused, community-driven product.

The natural question is of course, what does Melody offer that Movable Type doesn’t? For now, not much. Instead, Melody is focusing its initial efforts on re-writing the Movable Type core to make the platform more accessible to developers. The goals is to “decouple” some of the MT core — that is, cut out some of the more advanced features that many users don’t need and start with a more streamlined, lightweight base on which to build.

Unlike some open-source forks, Melody isn’t out to destroy Movable Type. The group plans to keep Melody compatible with the basic MT components — template language, plug-in architecture, et cetera — so that existing MT users can work with both projects without needing to rewrite any of their code. Melody also hopes that its more successful ideas will work themselves upstream, back into Movable Type’s future releases.

For the past few years, WordPress has enjoyed an astounding level of participation from the developer community. There are currently over 5,600 plug-ins available for WordPress, while Movable Type has around 850. The fact that Movable Type continues to be developed as a commercial product may have led to this discrepancy — paying customers demand stability, which often trumps experimentation. While that’s a win for companies relying on Movable Type to host successful websites, it has left some amateur fans out in the cold. Melody is hoping to bring those developers back into the community.

While Melody may not offer anything groundbreaking at the moment, its long term goals are ambitious. Perhaps the most interesting for developers is the plan to make it easier to incorporate existing code into Melody. For example, the Melody developers want to take advantage of the many CPAN Perl modules, and JavaScript libraries like jQuery.

In the case of CPAN, opening up Movable Type’s base to work with outside Perl modules means there’s no need to reinvent to wheel — you can simply import and use the existing tools. With jQuery, it isn’t hard to imagine Melody offering extras like automatic slide shows or other tools built on top of jQuery libraries.

If you’re a fan of Movable Type and would like to contribute to the Melody effort, head over to the new Melody website and see what’s on the development roadmap. You can also grab a copy of the source code, but be aware that Melody is, for the moment, intended primarily for developers looking to extend Movable Type.

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Facebook Opens Up Publisher - Now Go Tell Everyone

By Michael Calore June 25, 2009 Categories: Blog Publishing, Platforms & APIs

Facebook users will soon gain the ability to publish content so that everyone on the web can view it. This will lead a big change for Facebook users, many of whom have been limited to sharing content only with others on Facebook.

The social network has invited its beta testers to experiment with a new version of the site’s Publisher feature, the web-based tool Facebookers use to post status updates, photos and videos to their profiles.

This latest development, announced Wednesday, is only available to beta testers who have made their Facebook profiles visible publicly to everyone, not just Facebook users. The features will be made available soon to other users, the company says. This development also falls in line with Facebook’s support for Activity Streams, the emerging standard for organizing and adding structure to these streams of updates, photos, videos and comments.

The new Publisher contains some added privacy controls, enabling uesrs to push out posts to just their Facebook friends or everyone, on or off Facebook.

Interestingly, the default setting is “Everyone” — showing Facebook is offering some gentle encouragement to its users to share their posts with the whole internet.

Wired.com writer Ryan Singel points out the significance of this on Epicenter:

Clearly the intent is to convince users to publish to the world, since the default is set to “Everyone” — which means the entire internet — with the choice to narrow to “Friends,” “Friends of Friends,” “networks,” or select users when more privacy is wanted. It’s plainly an attempt to gather some of the energy and publicness of Twitter for Facebook, which has largely shied away from exposing its members’ activities outside its online walls.

…

Facebook also tipped its hat to Twitter three months ago with changes that added focus to real-time status updates and a change to the status question, which became: “What’s on your mind?” Twitter’s pre-existing equivalent is “What are you doing?”

We here at Webmonkey (and Epicenter) have been arguing for some time that Facebook should open up its network to allow the publishing of content outside its walls. The company has always balked at such a strategy, saying such a move would violate the trust of its users who have come to expect the strictest of privacy controls.

However, it seems Facebook may have found a way to open up the publishing ability while keeping those much-valued privacy controls intact.

Photo: Flickr/Andrew Feinberg

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FriendFeed Adds File Sharing, Including Support for MP3s

By Michael Calore June 24, 2009 Categories: Multimedia

The lifestreaming site FriendFeed has rolled out a new feature that lets users post almost any file to the site, including MP3s.

Users can now post PDFs, text files or MP3s to their accounts, sharing them with specific individuals, private groups within FriendFeed or with the internet at large. Any uploaded file, including the MP3s, can also be downloaded by anyone who’s able to see the page.

You’ve been able to post photos to FriendFeed for a while. The upload dialog even included a little Ajax-powered upload progress bar. The new uploads use the same interface, or you can mail the file to the site’s standard posting address at share@friendfeed.com.

Once uploaded, MP3s appear wrapped inside a simple player with a volume slider and the usual controls. Here’s an example.

There’s a per-user limit of 3 uploads per day for MP3s, though there doesn’t appear to be a limit of PDFs or other kinds of files. According to user chatter on FriendFeed, there does appear to be a limit on file sizes, but that information remains undisclosed. Also, the player widget only works if you upload MP3s, not AIFFs, WAVs or ACCs. If you run into any other interesting barriers, let us know in the comments.

FriendFeed’s addition of MP3 sharing features expands its scope a bit. It’s an advancement that’s sure to draw in some new users looking for an easy way to post a quick song and get a public URL, complete with an embedded player, that can be accessed by anyone.

Of course, it will also be attractive to those of us who use FriendFeed for collaboration and real work (we use it as our daily back-channel here at Monkey Bites, as do the Epicenter writers — Mr. W. T. Monkey even has his own feed), but the MP3 sharing is super cool and the real killer feature here.

Note: Also check out additional coverage on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

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Ubiquity, Firefox’s Command Line Web Interface, Gets More Natural

By Michael Calore June 24, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Firefox’s unique tool for interacting with web services has gotten easier to use thanks to a new update.

Ubiquity 0.5, a project from Mozilla Labs, is a major improvement to one of the browser’s most useful add-ons. It now uses a more natural language engine that’s closer to human speech, and there’s a helpful tutorial for new users. The update also includes support for more languages and more context-sensitive commands.

It’s officially a preview release for Firefox 3 and 3.5. It has a few bugs, but those eager to test it out can grab it now.

The Ubiquity add-on for Firefox is a “command line interface for the web”. It enables you to interact with web services like Google search, Twitter, Yelp, Delicious and Gmail, as well as perform searches on content sites like Amazon, Wikipedia and Flickr. Ubiquity enables you to perform specific tasks, like e-mail a link to a Gmail contact, post a tweet or check the weather, all with just a few keystrokes.

When Ubiquity was first released last year, we hailed it as a huge step forward for the web’s power users. It’s even slicker now, but it still has a problem.

It’s a command line — In order to get the most out of Ubiquity, you have to be the type of person who’s comfortable typing text-based commands into a text-based interface. Obviously, it’s not for everyone.

But the Ubiquity team is closing the gap. Taking a cue from such natural-language tools like Wolfram Alpha and Google’s iPhone app that lets you search the web using your voice, Ubiquity now boasts a new engine that’s able to guess what you want to do even if you don’t give it a specific command or verb.

Previously, you’d have to initiate a task by typing a command like “map” or “translate.” With the new update, you can simply plug an address or a French phrase into Ubiquity, and it’s now smart enough to discern what you want with a surprising level of accuracy.

Better yet, you can just highlight an address on a page and summon Ubiquity. The window will automatically guess you want a map and fetch it for you.

Same with that French phrase. Highlight it and Ubiquity will assume, since you’re using a localized English version of Firefox, you’re looking for an English translation.

Hit Enter and the actual French phrase on the web page is replaced by the English version.

Of course, if it fails to guess properly, you can correct Ubiquity by adding specific parameters to your query, and it will do better next time. It also learns your habits. If you’re a frequent Twitterer, Ubiquity will eventually assume that any raw text you type into it is intended for Twitter, and it will place that choice at the top of the list of suggested services.

As cool as these natural language improvements are, Ubiquity is still a rather esoteric add-on. Thankfully, the download comes with a very friendly tutorial that walks new users through a few common tasks. It really shortens the learning curve by showing you how to use the new command structure.

The tutorial also shows off the power of context-sensitive searches.

I typed “Pink Floyd images” into Ubiquity. My first options were Google image search and a Flickr image search, each with its own set of thumbnails on display within Ubiquity’s little window.

Next, I summoned Ubiquity with a keystroke and typed “cappuccino”. My suggested choices: Twitter the word “cappuccino,” search Yelp for “cappuccino” nearby, search Google for “cappuccino” and translate “cappuccino” into English.

Twitter popped up because that’s one of the things I use Ubiquity for most frequently — it’s learned that. Yelp popped up because Ubiquity gathered that this is a food item I might be looking for, so it’s assuming I want to find said item nearby. Google and Google Translate are probably the most logical third and fourth guesses in this circumstance (It means “cappuccino,” by the way).

View this functionality with an eye to the near future when the geolocation services are fully integrated into the browser, and you can sense how much more powerful this will get. You won’t need to enter any location information. Just type “pizza” or “bookstore” or “weather” and you’ll get what you want — a map, a list or the current temperature — without having to add “94107″ or “San Francisco” to your query.

This Ubiquity update isn’t perfect. It’s a preview release and still rather buggy. There’s a helpful “Reset to factory defaults” button on the help page, which I used a couple of times after Ubiquity kept getting stuck thinking I’d want to post everything to Delicious. Eventually, I removed Delicious from the Ubiquity’s list of available services. It also hung a few times, beach balling Firefox and forcing a browser restart.

But the improvements here point towards a whole new standard for easily interacting with web services in the browser, and we’d recommend it as an essential addition to your power user toolbox.

Will it catch on? Are web users ready for seemingly anachronistic text-based interfaces, no matter how useful? We hope so, because Ubiquity proves how powerful they can be.

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