Tag – You’re it! May 5, 2009
Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Internet, Technology.Tags: blog, browse, collaboration, data mining, database, graze, relational, repository, search, tag, tagging, Wiki
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One of the concerns that collaborative software helps to ease is the loss of precious intellectual capital with the leaving or retiring of an employee. This is a point that is well understood but a question I am often asked when I’m talking to clients about collaborative technologies is “What is the point of tagging? It’s so inconvenient, can’t we just have a drop down menu of all available tags?”
It’s a good question, and it comes from a place which is very comfortable with slick user interfaces. People are busy, doing real work – why do they have to do this ‘tagging stuff’? It’s almost back to the halcyon days of Wordstar!
There are a number of things to think about here – not least the fact that a drop down menu of tags would actually undermine the mechanism by which tagging works. Let me try and explain what I mean.
We are creating data at a rate faster than ever before, there are silos, mines and every concievable type of repository full of data, and it just keeps on coming. We need to find data, to find the right data, fast, in order to make good decisions. Google I am told, consumes as much power in a day, feeding it’s data crunching centres as a small city does in a week…let’s consider the user for a moment….
I’m a big music buyer and one thing that I do in every city I visit, if I have time, is to visit the music stores and browse the racks of CDs and Vinyl. Often, I’ll be inspired by what I see and my mind goes off in all directions, soon the original cd that I wanted to buy has been buried in a slew of conjecture, guesswork, associations etc. I’m standing in the middle of a warehouse full of music, completely unable to recall the name of the artist or the title of the album I came here to buy.
What do I do to recover? Well, it’s pretty easy really – I have to rebuild the associations that the album has for me and just as the experience of browsing can disrupt my train of thought, so it can be used to recover the train of thought. An example might be that elusive Johnny Thunders version of Green Onions….I might recall that it was vaguely something to do with the New York punk scene of the seventies. So browsing the groups that I can recall, Television, Patti Smith isn’t helping, Patti Smith’s Gloria is warm, but not right….it’s a cover, it’s a sixties song originally….hmmm who else covered sixties tunes, New York Dolls for one…..Stranded in the Jungle, Pills, getting warmer by the second,, who was in the New York Dolls….Johnny Thunders!
Ok, so that’s a slice of my day, but the point is that the data that helped me find that particular record has nothing to do with the record itself. It’s not data that would be held in a database listing the attributes of that record – we would expect to find serial number, media, song titles, artist, maybe a picture of the cover, but there’s no way I can browse to that row in the database in any intuitive way. The data that helped was: sixties’, ’seventies’, ‘New York’, ‘New York Dolls’, ‘cover’…. good candidates for tags in fact, in an article about that particular song!
So tagging enables intuitive search and human beings love searching intuitively. We are trying to make authors of everyone, but it is impractical to perform full text searches on the volumes of data that we are now producing. Tagging allows humans to feel their way through the information overload and retrieve data that is of value, reasonably quickly.
So that is the first point, the user in the ‘browse’ case really appreciates tagging. The second point is much more direct, authors take a pride in their work and actually quite like it when people read it! Blogs being a fantastic example – we use tags to make sure that an article comes up in these intuition led searches that internet users love to engage in. It is actually in the author’s interest to be creative about tagging, it will attract more readers.
Lastly, why can’t we have a drop down menu? Well I’ve seen ‘most used tags’ listed, which goes some of the way towards meeting this request, but my thinking is that while a list of most used tags might give me some options, I’d actually like to make up my own, maybe add to the list in time?
So, in a nutshell, tagging is all about information categorisation, indexing and retrieval – it leverages the human brain as much as it does the data mining, search applications and who knows, in view of google’s extraordinary electrical consumption could even be considered ‘green’!
2009 – The Year Of The Ox January 2, 2009
Posted by Chris Wright in Internet, Life, Technology.Tags: astrology, Brian Eno, Cormac McCarthy, Facebook, futurology, The Edge, Vox
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Futurology is notoriously ‘hit or miss’, we generally fail miserably with specifics, even in prosperous and optimistic times, so in this new dawning of recession and strife, not forgetting famine, plague and pestilence, it seems more appropriate than usual to turn to the generalists for advice. We live in interesting times!
The Chinese astrologer Han Teen See has these observations on the new year:
2009 The year of The Ox will be a very intense year. The many significant incidents that occur will be sudden and deadly. The year will be filled with many more wars, military engagements and terrorist atrocities compared to previous years. Military forces worldwide will be more aggressive and active which will signify the greater likelihood of wars and military engagements in selected regions of the world……
…..People will generally be more aggressive, impulsive and quick-tempered with such behavior spreading quickly like wild-fire. Direct conflicts, arguments and disputes will occur more frequently…..
…..There will be an increase of both organizations and individuals adopting unethical or illegal methods to benefit themselves this year. It will imply that corruption, evasion of proper business practices, tax evasion and fraud will be on the rise.
Companies and businesses that have expanded too rapidly and have done so without taking into account their cash flow and resource management will suffer badly this year. Furthermore, those companies and businesses that have not been giving fair value to their customers and clients will be badly affected as well. This is because, both customers and clients alike will be more selective in their choice of products and services and will choose those that give them fair value….
And so to The Edge. For those unfamiliar with this organisation, The Edge is a forum, drawing together some of the brightest minds in a spectrum covering science, the arts, education, and asking once a year, a question germane to the time. The annual question for 2009, perhaps picking up the theme of relentless gloom and despondency was ‘What will change everything?’
Brian Eno, offers this as his answer: “The feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse” ! The point he is making, is that the history of progress has been founded on a certainty that better things are around the corner. Optimism and hope have been practically hardwired into the psyche of the western world. What happens when that optimism and hope is removed? When we start to see the walls closing in, the world shrinking? Well, in Eno’s view, something remarkably similar to the predictions of Han Teen See. The emphasis will be on short term gain, once survival becomes a driver, selflessness becomes a distant memory and in politics and business, global initiatives fail because trust will fail – the moral framework breaks down and law and order quickly follow….Cormac McCarthy – The Road becomes the new reality. As an answer to the question, Eno is undoubtedly right – this is root cause.
So pestilence and plague it is then…or is it? This is one of those points in time where we have a choice, as individuals and collectively. The choices we make today may very well set the tone for the next hundred years. These are my predictions for the year.
This is a year where the buck stops. I fear for the bio-technology industry, as an occasional investor I headed for the safer havens of mainstream technology six months ago – and still lost more than I care to admit. More than any other sector of technology, bio-tech depends on research money, government projects etc etc. It has never been profitable and in current economic conditions, unless the model is substantially revised, I expect to see the sector struggle.
Web2.0 is a set of technologies, desperately short of a profit model. for all it’s targeted advertising, has anyone ever actually bought anything via Facebook? These applications are fabulous, revolutionary even, but unless somebody works out how to make money from them, we can expect to see turbulence ahead. My tip for survival – Vox. A hosted blogging application including many of the social software favourites such as file sharing, music, photos etc. It is aimed at the smaller community, organisations and families, and in so doing provides a sense of identity that could be converted into a selling point. The difference between Vox and Facebook is that Facebook encourages mass socialisation, and in so doing exposes its members to the scrutiny of strangers. Not everybody is enthused by this model. Vox encourages privacy and this could turn out to be a differentiator worth paying for.
More generally, I’d expect to see businesses and governments start to prepare themselves for the new reality. This is a time for strong vision and fearless leadership. At government level we should expect to see an upsurge in technology mediated education – we’ve been talking about it for long enough, let’s see action! Dare we also anticipate an upgrading of the IT infrastructure such that fast broadband is achievable in every home?
The motor industry is one to watch – Toyota posted a loss for the first time in fifty years? Ford, Chrysler and General Motors had to be bailed out by the US government. The message is modernise or fail. We should see these companies ruthlessly stripped back to fighting weight, better use of technology, resulting in better knowledge retention and less waste.
I expect to see customers demand value for money – the first green shoots are beginning to appear already. I was able to negotiate a discount of 20% before Christmas, on designer clothes purchased in the high street. If you don’t ask, you won’t get. Services will be more realistically priced because there are so many alternatives. The wild fluctuations in transport pricing should start to level out – my favourite recent example being the purchase of a flight from Edinburgh to Belfast for less than £1 + airport taxes, the next day, being asked by Virgin Rail to pay more than £250 for a rail ticket from London to Manchester. I decided not to travel that day. If the UK government wants to get people to use the trains instead of the roads, then we need to regulate pricing. The excuses being trotted out by Virgin and their ilk (passengers paying for the running of underused services) are the same excuses used in the sixties, before the rail networks were nationalised. They simply don’t wash a second time. Businesses who are seen to be exploiting their customer base are at risk. That’s all there is.
In the end, 2009 is an opportunity. It’s my hope that governments, businesses and individuals start to make the right decisions, to enable freedom of movement globally, to encourage global cooperation and trust and in so doing enable a return to prosperity. It is my darkest fear that they won’t.
Meh! November 25, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Internet, Life, Technology.Tags: blog, Meme, Web 2.0, Wiki
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The recent inclusion of ‘meh’ in the Collins English Dictionary and the elevation of “wiki” to the Oxford English dictionary have provoked some hilarious postings on The Register. The subject of net neoligisms is one which by turn vexes and fascinates.
History tells us that the evolution of a spoken or written language is accelerated by slang, by the absorption of ‘foreign’ words into the current idiom. Over time, some of these words stick, others fall by the wayside. The continuous process keeps language alive and vital. Attempts to record a language, definitively, are by their very nature doomed to failure because existing words pick up new meanings, and new words emerge to provide more distinct or precise meaning.
The evolution of the English language can be traced to several significant stages. The spoken language in England was originally several dialects of Celtic origin. In the 5th Century, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes invaded from Denmark and northern germany, in the process pushing the native inhabitants and their languages, north to Scotland and west to Wales and Ireland. Gaelic, one variety of a Celtic language is found in Scotland and Ireland, Welsh, another variety is still spoken in Wales.
During the 600 odd years leading up to the Norman invasion of 1066, the languages imported by the germanic tribes coalesced into what we now call Old English – about half of the words in current parlance have their roots in Old English. The Normans brought French to the island and with it, a rigid class system. The upper classes and business classes spoke French, the peasantry Old English. Over a period of some 400 years, middle English, the language of Chaucer emerged – broadly, Old English with added French!
The 16th century brought the Renaissance and with it, travel – this had a profound effect on the language, new words were imported by traders and other travellers and the invention of the printing press accelerated the standardisation of what became Early Modern English.
Late Modern English has persisted from appproximately 1600 to the present day, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution creating a need for new words to describe new technologies and the British Empire adopting words from the colonies. Varieties of late modern english have evolved and cross pollinated through the power of media, so American English with its strong Spanish and French influences has brought words such as vigilante into the common language via the movies.
Which brings us to the vexing question of ‘meh’. If there were a Darwinian theory of language it would say that the words that are fit for purpose, that bring more precision, that are required would be the ones to survive. There is a very strong argument that, that has usually been the case. This is why slang has such a strong influence on language. Slang evolves, to meet circumstances which are geographical, cultural and societal at specific points in time. An example of this would be the changing usage of the word ’swinging’.
Originally ’swinging’ referred to the sideways oscillation of an object, suspended from a fixed point. In the fifties, it acquired a new meaning, related to jazz, swinging morphed into a description of rhythm – still vaguely related to oscillation. In the sixties it was used to describe a different form of music – beat, and ‘Swinging’ became an interjection of approval. A pop group ‘The Swinging Blue Jeans’ capitalised on this meaning as a means of buying instant credibility with the public. The seventies, brought with it a darker meaning, completely separated now from its roots, swinging referred to the appalling practice of wife swapping for sexual adventure that is reputed to have infested suburbia during those straitened times.
Two things are significant – the greatly reduced time span – 30 years in this case and the completely different meaning attached to the word by the end of the tie span – it is the speed of change that has increased dramatically.
‘Meh’ is a word that has not evolved so much as occured. Hijacked from the Simpsons, it has held its original meaning, and been gleefully adopted by the Nathan Barley generation as an all purpose utterance signifying boredom, ennui. Like many neoligisms spawned by the net, it serves no uniquely useful purpose and does not substantially clarify nor make more precise the articulation of that feeling it purports to describe.
Not all net neoligisms are so useless – meme, cyberspace, unfriend are all useful words which better describe something – they bring value to the language in a way which ‘meh’ conspicuously fails to emulate. ‘Meh’ is a word which is so strongly reminiscent of the utterance of a sheep that its continued usage by otherwise intelligent people mystifies me totally. I wonder about decadence at times – the adoption of useless and ultimately destructive practices. In the increasingly self referential world of new media, I see useful technologies whose advocates, in their frenetic adoption of every passing fad, are ultimately failing to communicate – the very issue these technologies are supposed to solve.
Comments in Late Modern English please!
// Credit for much of the thinking behind this post should be given to Jacqui Rowe, Mel Curtiss, Elle Gee, and Brenda McWalters whose spirited rejoinders to my flippant post on Facebook made me think!
Pownced! October 3, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Blogs, Internet, Life, Technology.Tags: AIR, microblog, Pownce, Twitter, WebKit
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My experiments with Twitter, documented in previous postings here have stubbornly refused to yield any conclusive proof that the tool is useful for anything other than spreading gnomic utterances about life, my blogs, the universe and er…. computers. I struggle to write interesting one liners -and deprived of the context that Facebook provides it’s status line, the one liners really don’t do it for me. I’m full of beans but do I really need to tell the world?
The problem, I think, is that when I consider it, I don’t have a lot of practice in meaningful many to many communications – in fact the relentless march of technology has herded us all away from the family dinner table, into either 1:1 communications (txt, telephone) or 1:Many (n) communications (radio, TV). We’re just not that good at n: n. I challenge you to remember the last conference call where you didn’t have to IM a colleague to enquire “Who is this talking?”.. Actually, the dinner table doesn’t generally yield fantastic results – except possibly in volume, but at least I usually know who’s talking. Probably me.
Which brings me to Pownce ! Just what I need, I thought, another microblogging / social software solution – only Pownce actually has some rather interesting features. Starting on the basis that it is a microblog, it has the concept of friends (not followers, thank god! I was never comfortable with that conceit). Messages can be broadcast or private – ie the app can be used to IM with a friend. OK Twitter can as well if you use the direct message facility, but Pownce is a lot more intuitive.
The killer functionality though is file attachments – you can send in the free client, 50mb attachments as part of a chat session. A file – music, picture, or a link or an event. Signing up to the Pro version raises the bar to 250mb. To me this makes the application immediately useful, in a way that Twitter just isn’t.
Additionally, Pownce has a downloadable client, running on the Adobe Air platform which utilises both the WebKit (in common with Chrome) and Flash engines, has published API’s and a rapidly expanding list of supported / integrated tooling. Including inevitably iPhone support, Facebook synchronisation and a host of other interesting looking widgets.
I’m in. Once the user base has grown and the tooling supports automated Powncing in the same way that Twitter does, I see Pownce as a real contender – in fact, in these times of market turmoil I’d be tempted to put money on it!
Video Killed The Radio Star October 1, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Music, Technology.Tags: Apple, BBC, CD, iTunes, Music, Sony, Wired
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Who killed the recorded music industry? In the light of Apple’s veiled threat to shut down iTunes in the face of demands from the music publishing industry for a larger slice of the pie, this question is suddenly a lot more relevant. The central issue is not about Apple, it is about the way that society rewards artists and the failure of the free market to keep up with technology.
Before the gramaphone (ignoring the wax cylinder) there was no recorded music industry. Musicians made a precarious living by playing real instruments, live, in front of real people. Songwriters had a share of the sheet music sales from popular songs. as I said, the living was precarious.
The music industry as we know it, evolved during the sixties – by this I mean the infrastructure of the industry, the distribution channels, the manufacturing, recording and marketing instruments, the fundamental structure of a recording contract that tied an artist into promoting records on tours underwritten by the record companies, ultimately paid for by the royalties on successful records. and by records, I mean the physical vinyl artifact.
This arrangement suited the record companies very well, so well that when CD’s and digital file formats arrived, they completely failed to see the writing on the wall. It was abundantly obvious to anyone with the wit to look, that recorded music would be passed from person to person via computer networks. In one fell swoop, the record companies lost control of the medium and some would say, the industry.
Napster, the peer to peer file sharing service was the first to really get under the record companies skin – hugely successful, the companies invention, a peer to peer music sharing system created a model for a decentralised distribution channel that has proved impossible for the traditional industry to control. It took a federal government to close down Napster, but there are a host of similar enterprises still in semi legal business.
This is why it has been so difficult for the industry to deal with. For each track there is an owner of the sound recording, the record company. There is also a separate work, the musical composition – the song the artist sings. By law, each track of the CD is also considered a reproduction of the musical composition. On a typical CD, there may be 12 sound recordings and 8 separate music publishers. Multiply that times 3,000 record companies in the US, and 25,000 music publishers, times 27,000 new CDs per year. Separate individual negotiations for all these rights are simply not a viable option.
With CD sales falling last year by 20% to ($7.4bn (£4bn)), the record companies now have a major problem. The artists do too, but the good ones are now making up the shortfall by playing live – this has to be good for the long term health of the art. By which i mean that new technology has been seen by the record companies as primarily a means of reducing recording costs – to the detriment of the quality of the product, as the art of songwriting took a back seat to the art of sampling. In the current climate, forcing acts to play live may encourage the use of technology to entertain the audiences again. But it’s not that simple.
Traditionally, the audience / society, pays the piper – prices are hiked and artists, record companies and publishers all live happily ever after. Now however there is a problem. Apple don’t own the medium, they are just the de facto owners of the largest share of the market. Rivals include Sony, who as a record and hardware company themselves, would be very well placed to mount a strong competitive alternative. So Apple will not want the price of recorded music to rise. The record companies, watching their profits dwindle daily are unlikely to want to take the hit, which leaves the publishers and the artists themselves.
Interesting times ahead. Should songwriters be paid for writing songs? Is it reasonable for the record industry to seek to sustain its profit levels when they no longer own the medium? What does the record industry do in these days of digital recording technology, to justify its profit? Should Apple simply raise the price of digital music?
What if the artist retains control of the recording? Is there any point in recording 12 song albums any longer? What are the implications of selling less songs? Would a tour the size of Madonna’s for example be sustainable on the back of the profit gained from a couple of singles? Actually the answer to that one is yes, ditto The Rolling Stones, but what of the middle ranking acts that depend on touring to shift albums?
But back to the central issue – we have an audience, millions of music hungry people with money to burn, who are quite happy to spend it. We have a computer company, Apple, capitalising on the digital format to charge the audience for the music at 99 cents per track. We have a music industry desperate to play ball with Apple because they no longer own the medium. We have a music publishing industry asserting its right to gain a higher percentage of the digital rights – so who loses?
Answers on a postcard please!
Marlboro Mum September 29, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Advertising.Tags: Marlboro
2 comments
Latest in the occasional series….courtesy of Cory Doctorow’s excellent Craphound.com
and what could be more natural after a good helping of lard?
What Business are Google in? September 16, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.Tags: Chrome, Desktop, Google, IBM, Microsoft
6 comments
So the fuss about Chrome has more or less died down – a few minor addendums, the cheeky ‘open in Chrome’ addon for Firefox being a particular favourite. But in spite of more bloggery than you can shake a stick at, the anticipated browser stand-off never really materialised and the really interesting questions around Google’s business strategy – such as ‘Why Chrome?’ have never really been examined.
Google started out in the algorithm business – search to be specific. Knocking out Alta Vista to become the search engine of choice and winning plaudits for the wonderful simplicity (usability) of their interface would represent a significant triumph for many, but since then they have pushed further into the field of web based applications and social computing.
- Google Earth – phenomenally successful application, arresting interface and hey! nothing beats examining the roof for missing tiles from the comfort of my desk!
- iGoogle – currently my home page – clean design, useful information, perfect start to the day! A portal basically.
- Google Directory – The web organised by topic into categories – search by grazing
- Google Maps – A lot of competition, multimap, AA, Satellite Navigation,
- Google Video – builds on Search, but YouTube remains the video repository of choice
- Google Groups – Usenet Archive, building on Search
- Google Desktop – Brings Search to the local computer – records and analyses search patterns
- Google Apps – Web based collaboration – GMail, Document Share, Calendar, IM
- Google Chrome – Brings browsing and browsing habits to Google – thats a lot of personal information they can leverage.
I may have missed a few, but a picture begins to emerge – expanding on Search, Google are running up against some tough competition – YouTube have mindshare in the video market, Mapping, once indispensable, has lost out to Satellite Navigation.
One theory is that Google are going after the desktop and will therefore be competing with Microsoft in the Personal Computing space. Let’s examine that theory.
Prior to the internet, the IT market could be broadly categorised in two sectors – standalone personal computing and network attached computing. Microsoft dominated the first group completely, and mounted an assault on the second as business computing moved from centralised mainframe based services to decentralised network supported PC’s. IBM, with the Lotus Collaboration suite play in the second group. Oracle too. All three of these enterprises have a licensing structure that ties the number of users or the number of processors that software is deployed on to the price that is paid for the license.
The concept of web based software or software as a service is one which will have an immense impact on the way that software is licensed – IBM have made productivity software – word processing, spreadsheet and presentation (Lotus Symphony) available free of charge. Google have made almost all of their software available free of charge. Google however, have a strong revenue stream, advertising, that does not depend directly on an install base.
The nature of Google’s foray into the desktop then, could be predicated on the idea that information (about the user) will unlock greater advertising revenue, because they will be better able to target the ads. Significantly, Microsoft, by purchasing a share of Facebook have unlocked a similar revenue stream. Should we look forward to Microsoft offering free software to Facebook users?
These are interesting times – Google Chrome – just a neat browser or the latest move in a battle for the desktop?
What do you think?
The New Facebook September 13, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.Tags: Bebo, Facebook, mySpace, Portal
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So as everybody surely noticed, Facebook has been migrating its users to the new layout over the last month or so. This week has been particularly trying, with menu items disappearing, switching positions, links failing, and most mysteriously applications evaporating…
We seem to be experiencing design by committee and there is a danger that we end up with a dromedary. Some of the changes are hard to fathom, some are probably driven by disgruntled application providers, some may be driven by user feedback. Certainly all the symptoms of a project not being thought through are present and correct!
The migration has caused a degree of consternation in the user population, as the new design represents a fairly major paradigm shift and ushers in a user experience that further differentiates the ‘book from its competitors.
There is an underlying theme – Facebook is looking like a more mature and businesslike application, and in this Facebook is playing to its consumer base. If we take a sample of the major social sites, and align them to their user bases, you get a spectrum that puts LinkedIn at one extreme, Bebo at the other and positions Facebook and MySpace somewhere in the middle. Facebook has steadily carved out a niche as the creative professionals preferred site, leaching users from LinkedIn in the process – MySpace has similarly captured the up and coming musicians and teenagers. The new Facebook consolidates this positioning and will continue to polarise the user base accordingly.
Facebook 2.0 Home
The new look takes Facebook further into Portal territory – instead of a single page, infested with useless crap whimsical applications, the default profile and home layouts divide the users domain between a number of different tabs. The default home page is the Feed, with items filtered into Status Updates, Photos, Posted Items, and the default News showing a judicious mix of all three – the user can choose to see more or less items from any individual. this I think is a major improvement and offers the user some control – the noisiest people need no longer dominate the space.
The Profile is the area that seems to be causing the most pain to the users, and by messing about with the navigation, ‘in flight’ Facebook is trashing one of the fundamental rules of GUI design – consistency has been abandoned in recent days as menu items shed functionality and swap places with all the orchestration of a vexatious gibbon. One wonders for example why they found it necessary to switch the position of the Home and viewable Profile (Chris Wright) links?
When the new look was first unveiled, the first thing I did was jettison a whole slew of applications that had accumulated like paperclips on my profile, the default tabs offering Wall, Info, Photos and the imaginatively titled Boxes (applications). An extra tab makes it possible to add an application with it’s own tab – however it is sadly not possible to create a tab and move a bunch of similar applications into it. ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, ‘Listening’ for example.
Facebook 2.0 Profile
For a few weeks it has been possible to add applications without assigning them to a page, a fabulous idea which I wholeheartedly approve of, software on demand! Access was possible via the Applications Bookmark. This promised a clutter free environment and a laudably usable navigation. Unfortunate then that this is now restricted to the Wall, the one place I didn’t want applications to appear! The ready access to application bookmarks via the Applications tab has been replaced by an apparently unconfigurable bottom bar which ushers in a new low (sic) in pointless and unusable navigation facilities. So if I want to use or view an application today, I have to navigate to the page that it lives on – how tedious, and so last year! I suspect that the application providers were behind the rethink, perhaps reasoning that a visible application will get installed by more people. Shame.
Facebook has dropped another clanger in restricting the tabs to a single application – let’s explore an alternative: I am a voracious reader and writer – I have installed many applications that are connected by this behaviour – for example, the peerless ‘Just Three Words’, Visual Bookshelf’, ‘WordPress’ etc. I’d like to be able to group these under a single tab, or at worst to be able to nest my tabs. This is not possible today, and worse, some applications don’t support pages, so there is no option but to place them in ‘Boxes’. This capability has been around in portals for several years, so I wonder why Facebook are making such a mess of it?
So in keeping with my theme:
Magic
Tabs
Wall
Filtered Feed
Lies
No user controlled Nested Tabs
Ever ‘improving’ top level navigation
dysfunctional javascript
application navigation
I have no doubt that the coming weeks will see more improvement and perhaps even stability. I’m optimistic and actually, despite moaning horribly about the many implementation issues we are being subjected to, I prefer the new look. I expect to be updating this post – the sooner the better!
Update 14.09.08
The application list in the bottom left hand corner is now configurable – reorder by dragging. applications also appear on profile – box mid-right.
Burnished Chrome September 3, 2008
Posted by Chris Wright in Technology.Tags: Browser, Chrome, Firefox, Google
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To a deafening blast of bloggery, Google Chrome was finally released – the technical side has been pretty comprehensively covered by now, by more informed people than I, but what of the non-technical, why is this not just another product release?
Well Chrome is significant for maybe three reasons.
1. Its the first big power play from a credible power broker in several years
2. It’s the first credible threat to Firefox
3. It does things differently – under the covers it’s been written for speed, it has been designed as a web application platform (old fashioned browsers did not have Web2.0 in mind)
So how does that translate?
The IT landscape is dominated by a very small number of companies, this has happened in part, because Microsoft managed to acquire the desktop to the extent that it’s operating system is the default on every PC sold. They were only prevented from ‘acquiring’ the browsing experience, by legal action forbidding them to make Internet Explorer part of the operating system. Other corporate contenders have expanded by acquisition as well as by market growth, leading to a landscape not unlike the Premiership, where the ‘big four’ companies appear to be there for the long term.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but nobody forecast the extent to which Search would become the lynchpin of the internet. I have an ancient copy of ‘Wired’ magazine that features an interview with someone who used to make a handsome living by ‘finding’ things on the internet for corporate clients. How pleased were they when Alta Vista came out? Google came out of left field, revolutionised search technology and reinvented the business model, making advertising the principle source of income and by going public, gatecrashed the party at the top table in the process.
So now, Google (and quite a few others) want to carve up the desktop – the browser is the most used application by a country mile, the concept of software as a service is catching on fast and Google, in releasing a web browser are after their slice of the pie. Microsoft, presumed to be vulnerable in the wake of Bill Gates departure and the extreme negativity attracted by Vista, don’t seem to have much to say – though watch this space, it’s not on their nature to rest on their laurels. The significance of owning the browser, to Google, is that access to the users browsing habits will enable them to target advertising even more accurately than they do currently, using the data gleaned from user’s search patterns.
So the release of a new browser, re-engineered to render complex web applications is big news – success will buy Google a new market.
How does Chrome perform?
The Magic and lies:
Most striking is the uncluttered gui, it’s simply a window, the default tab, which contains your most clicked pages, arranged in a table. Like all the best GUIs, it’s simple, it works and it will be copied.
Google Chrome - Tabs
The tabs are at the top of the application – emphasising the fact that effectively each tab is a different application – so if one tab freezes the other live on – I was unable to test this, but I believe that is the general idea.
I was unable to see much difference in speed, testing on Facebook, which is the slowest application I know.
Chrome has a marvellously uncluttered interface, but consequently lacks the widgets – StumbleUpon, ScreenGrab, Delicious etc that have made Firefox such an important application. It allows ‘anonymous’ browsing – no cookies, history etc – now I can only think of one section of the market that would see this as a Firefox killer – which bring me neatly to the licensing issue.
In common with Facebook, Google have decided that they want the free and unfettered use of everything that passes through the browser. It’s well known that any media uploaded to Facebook effectively becomes the property of Facebook, now Google want a slice of the pie – so if I use Chrome to upload my photograph to Flickr, Google own the rights to reuse and distribute that photograph. If I use Chrome to upload the photograph to Facebook…hang on a minute, they can’t both own the image? Can they? Well, no, they can’t. So far as both companies are concerned, the author holds the copyright, they simply want the right to use the material without paying a royalty.
The spirit of the license, in both cases, one is asked to believe, is that the companies concerned wish to protect themselves against opportunistic legal action. Both companies use the term non-exclusive and both explicitly say that copyright and intellectual property remain with the originator. So to be clear, in uploading a photograph using Chrome, to Facebook, the user is granting both companies non-exclusive rights to do with that photograph what they wish, including sell it.
Will Chrome be successful? – It lacks the wow! factor of Google earth (or Search). It looks like an old fashioned Apple Mac application and not in a good way – visually it doesn’t blend seamlessly with the OS in the way that we are beginning to expect. It is the ‘Flock of Seagulls’ to Vista and Apple’s New Romantics, SteamPunk it ain’t. The licence gambit seems to be attracting as much criticism as Facebook’s similar play, and the anonymous browsing feature is superfluous for most people. Having said that, the code I have is beta, and it didn’t crash once today – so top marks for testing. I certainly won’t be using Chrome as part of my toolkit just yet – but I’m keeping an open mind – Firefox is becoming bloated and unreliable, throwing more processing power at it is expensive and a new browser is free….
