Month: December 2009

“Wouldn’t it be great, then, to start from scratch and design something based on the needs of today’s web applications and today’s users?”

– the Chrome Comic, Sep 08

In other words, if you can’t build it fast enough, we’ll do it ourselves.

Browsers are unstable and slow because of single-threaded javascript? We’ll build a new browser altogether. Windows/Mac OS too bloated for the folks that want to get on the web? We’ll build a new zippy laptop operating system that has just the web. Too hard to get your email, calendar, maps on your phone? We’ll build a mobile device that just works. Attaching docs and quoting from previous email seems inefficient? We’ll invent email all over again today. Website lookups slowing down your browsing? Use our DNS servers.

We can’t believe the web hasn’t changed given all the cheap bandwidth and online data.

No longer will constrain our applications to fit your web. If your web can’t run them, we’ll re-tool the web ourselves.

And strike distribution deals to get these tools in your hands. So you can get to our applications. Faster and more often.

Welcome to our new decade.

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame on how the different parts of a blogging system could be decoupled and run off specialized web applications: authoring by desktop apps, storage of raw posts and hosting on Amazon S3, templates by WordPress, feeds by FeedBurner and comments by Disqus/others.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress/Movable Type blog, you’re already there. Instead of S3, you’re hosting it on your hosting provider’s space (which could well be S3). In fact, this is how rahulgaitonde dot org works.

Now Joshua only alludes to this, but these pieces aren’t coupled loosely enough to move to plug out one component and fit another in. For example, I can’t take the Feedburner RSS component out and replace with another – my RSS feed URL is tied to Feedburner. I can’t move my template transparently between Blogger and Movable Type.

Back in May 2008, I had similar thoughts about separating the email interface from email storage:

There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.

I wonder whether in the future we’ll eventually build such a decoupled email system, or find an alternative to email altogether.

For India and China, a Climate Clash With Their Own Destiny (NYT): “India and China are encouraged to balance their internal duties as developing countries with their external responsibilities as emerging giants. They are told to short-circuit history, to avoid tactics for growth that the West now sees as errors, to assume obligations that rich lands took on only when they became much wealthier.”

The meaning of Open (Google’s Official Blog): An email to Google’s Product Mgrs from the SVP of Prod. Mgmt. “…you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people’s lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf, who didn’t know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this “Internet” so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.”

Why banks are suddenly repaying their TARP funds (Newsweek): “From the outset, healthy banks were eager to get out from under the TARP because they wanted to avoid discussions about appropriate levels of executive compensation.”

Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines: “The design has an eye to how paper magazines can re-use their editorial work without having to drastically change their workflow or add new teams. Maybe if the form is clear enough then every mag, no matter how niche, can look gorgeous, be super easy to understand, and have a great reading experience.”

the Blackberry (and iPhone and the Treo), a reminder of just how unconnected we were not ten years ago.

(via the Washington Post’s list of the ten worst ideas of the decade.)

Is the American Dream over?: David Brooks and Gail Collins of the NYT debate if the current crisis is an indication that American Life is inherently unsustainable, or merely another manifestation of the problem of inequality of skills.

PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps: How PayPal is extending its APIs to let developers build payment into web & mobile apps for the future.

How Apple’s internal organization is different because of the CEO’s obsession with great design. Inputs from senior Apple alumni.

Morgan Stanley’s Mobile Internet Report Dec 09 [PDF]: 92-page ‘key themes’. Noteworthy: the ‘mobile internet’ could be bigger than the ‘desktop internet’ in 5 years.

is the essence of the difference between Facebook-like and Twitter-like networks.

People want as many people as possible to hear their opinions, and as few to know more about who they are.

Which is why Twitter thrives the more open it is, while every one of Facebook’s privacy-related moves breeds paranoia.

From Nokia’s EVP of services (the guy responsible for Nokia’s push into email, music, apps and the like):

In India, for example, Nokia’s music download service is becoming popular mostly because many people don’t have PCs and are using their phones to download music.

I’m surprised. If these downloads are over GRPS/EDGE, they’ll take forever. How else is this done? And equally importantly, do people really pay for music here?

A car and a bicycle: John Gruber on Chrome OS – “The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating. That’s the opportunity, and that’s the idea behind Chrome OS and Litl and even Android and iPhone OS.”

On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca: Tim Ferriss presents a translation of Lucius Seneca’s letter – ‘It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”

In defense of readers: “Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking… [w]e concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still”.

Local Governments Offer Data to Miners: “A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?” I can imagine several ways in which this sort of open government combined with mobile access could improve everyday urban life – even in India.

Compared to Chrome (and F’fox and Safari), Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is embarrassingly slow on modern websites.

If you’re looking to convert your Mom/Dad/other Net newbie to F’fox/Chrome, you don’t need to talk about security and multi-tabbing and standards-compliance anymore. All you need to do is open Gmail or Facebook or the New York Times on both browsers.

Just speed is enough.