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Posts Tagged ‘Google’

A new kind of browsing could be headed your way

12 Sep

I had the TWiTLive stream of Bear Hug Camp playing in the background for a great deal of the afternoon.  At first I thought it was going to be a train wreck.  Steve Gilmore as the moderator in the beginning was a poor choice.  I know he was an organizer of the get together, but his opinions are far to strong on the matter to be impartial or even patient with those who might have other opinions.  I think the limited time with the Twitter guys could have been more productively spent than everyone listening to him berate them for taking his track away and hearing how he must get back otherwise the dastardly Republicans will keep the White House.  Does he really think the Twitterverse is that big or important?

Much to my surprise, the conference quickly redeemed itself.  The “Big Thinkers” eventually shut up and let the tech guy start to work out the details.  In addition to the Twitter guys, who couldn’t return after lunch, there were representatives from Google, Seesmic, Microsoft, Facebook, Identispy, and others.  Evan Prodromou, of Identica and Laconica, presented his Open Micro Blogging specification and he and the other began to hash out the details of how these social communities can share their event streams and how aggregators can add value and federation for everyone.

I still think there is an awful lot of reinventing the wheel here.  As one of the participant pointed out on more than one occasion, many things that Evan is trying to formalize, like federation, are already solve with XMPP and the XEPs.  As I’ve stated before, I think it would make much more sense to build the whole infrastructure on XMPP.  The web is really just a presentation interface, and this is really micro messaging, not microblogging.  Imagine, XMPP routers routing messages of various XML schemas to you based on your criteria, your client renders them for you based on XSL transformations that you specify, and if your client can render that schema then it knows how and to whom you can respond if you wish to participate in the conversation. It’s got a long way to go, but there some really potential here to change both the web and messaging.

 
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Posted in Technology

 

What’s important about Chrome

06 Sep

I just finished reading Google’s comic book about there new browser effort, Chrome.  Much has been written this week in the Tech press:  Why do we need another browser?  Just another attempt to gather more data about me.  What, windows only?! Etc.  Well, this is the first chance I’ve had to check for myself, and I must say I’m impressed.

First off, everything is open source.  Re-using existing open source components when available and writing new ones when necessary to achive their goals.  Very smart.  Additionallly, the new components that prove to be superior can be adopted or adapted by other Firefox and other browser that choose to participate in the open source world.  Much like their use of Gears to prototype things they are proposing to the W3 standards bodies, this is about building the infrastructure for a richer web.  So, all the breathless paranoia about privacy is just that.  There won’t be in privacy busting components in there because it’s open source and would be exposed immediately.

Second, they’ve reallly thought about what’s wrong with the browser security model, and they are not only fixing it, but showing everyone else how to do it.  The comination of the sandboxing and the process model are very important.  As the web moves more and more toward becoming it’s own applications platform, all browsers will need to adopt this or die.

Finally, we have V8, the javascript VM.  Here, I’m excited about the performance possibilities, but also a little concerned.  There is a lot of divergent work going on in this space.  Mozilla is building their own VM.  Microsoft is almost basing IE 8 on their DCLR.  The Webkit guys also have work in this direction.  Google’s, Mozilla’s, and Webkit’s are open source and will likely be used in other projects.  But, as a developer, what I really want to see is a standardization of the VM interface.  If my applet can be compiled, compressed byte codes, then I not only save time at runtime, but I can also write applications in other languages and use a compiler targeted at the VM.  As web application increase in complexity, maintaining them will be a nightmare if we can’t use more appropriate languages.

 
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Posted in FOSS, Software Development, Technology