A platform for building social web apps. That’s a brilliant idea.
And they encourage source code sharing, which should make it much easier to get started by cloning existing apps.
Yahoo!, Microsoft or Google should acquire this company and really make it go. Hmm… could be a nice partner to Yahoo!’s recent Flickr and Delicious acquisitions.
I recently came across two interesting tools for synchronizing data across multiple machines.
Sean sent me mail about Google Browser Sync, a tool which continuously synchronizes Firefox browser settings – bookmarks, history, cookies, open tabs and windows, etc. – across your computers. I haven’t signed up yet but it sounds pretty handy to me, especially synchronization of open tabs and windows.
I anticipate one usability problem: according to the FAQ, Browser Sync only allows you to be logged in to one browser at a time. This would be an annoyance for me as I generally have two computers running. Nevertheless, I’ll give it a whirl and find out for myself.
Funding this sort of work is strategically smart for Google. It helps make Firefox a stronger companion to Google’s web services, it takes market share from Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s web services, and it gives Google more information about the universe of URLs out there: new ideas on URLs to index, plus ability to analyze URL visit patterns and correlations of visits between particular URLs. (E.g. if you visit http://Foo.com a lot, you might want to visit http://Bar.com too.) Google’s privacy policy makes it clear this sort of analysis of your private data is explicitly permitted.
The other sync tool is FolderShare, which Microsoft acquired in November 2005. (Time-honored acquisition plan: build a product that plugs a large and painful hole in a bigger company’s strategy. Windows has needed file synch forever.)
I’ve been rolling my own synch solution for years using a hodge-podge of batch scripts, xxcopy, and static IP addresses, and I must say that FolderShare makes it a heck of a lot easier. I’ve been using FolderShare the past few weeks to synchronize pictures and project documents across a few computers, and I plan to try using it to share pictures with family and friends. I particularly like that it works on the Mac. I can imagine setting this up with not-so-tech-savvy family members so that their computer always picks up your latest photographs automatically.
FolderShare does have a few limits: it cannot transfer files larger than 2GB; there is a maximum of 10,000 files per library; and you may create a maximum of 10 libraries (library = file folder). The 10k/10 libraries limit is probably built in so that Microsoft can offer a “professional” version targeted at businesses and heavy end users. I guess I fall into the latter category: my music library is way bigger than 10,000 files, and I’d love an easy way to sync up my laptop so that my tunes are always with me.
Parting thought: it’s interesting to see more and more services which ask end users to deeply trust companies with their personal data: email, documents, search history, browsing habits. Building that sort of trust is hard. In many ways trustworthiness is the most expensive asset to build up, and the most defensible from a competitive standpoint. As a long-term sustainable competitive advantage, trust beats technology any day.
One of the reasons I like DemoCamp is that each time I come away with a few cool new tech snippets (”nerdlets?”). Below are four I took away from the most recent event. For in-depth recaps of the entire event see Chris Nolan’s entertainingly caustic demo reviews and Joey DeVilla’s coverage.
1. The folks at unspace.ca have built a very intuitive and usable datagrid control and search UI. Froody.
2. BlogMatrix is doing some interesting work blending microformats with the blog paradigm. I can imagine some neat B2B applications, and I’m curious to see how the product evolves into a sustainable business. It sounds like they already have some paying customers, which is great.
3. There is room for innovation in spreadsheets and UI for tabular data. Dabble DB rocked the house.
4. Chris Nolan’s talk convinced me to kick the tires a little harder on Ruby on Rails and start using firebug.
I’ve been blogging for about 6 months now. I’m definitely still a fumbling newbie, but despite a few mishaps it’s proving to be great fun and a wonderful way to meet and stay connected with people. A few friends interested in running blogs of their own have asked me what tools I use to do it, so I’ve put together a few posts describing my approach. This first one is about the blog publishing services I use. I’ll do a follow-up later on the hard part: writing.
A word of warning before I dive in: the setup I use is great if — and only if — you want to have complete control over your blog’s content and features, and you are not shy of doing a wee bit of PHP code tweaking. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, check out blog hosting services instead. Blog hosters do all the heavy lifting for you, and most of them are free. LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace and Blogger are some of the most popular.
Now, for those of you who want all the bells and whistles, on to my config:
Blog publishing: I use WordPress, which is one of the top blog publishing packages. It’s quite feature-rich; I haven’t found myself wanting yet. WordPress is easy to extend with plug-ins that offer new features. And with only a little more work you can hack the PHP code to customize anything else about the blog, since it is entirely open-source. You can host it yourself to get complete flexibility, as I do, or use the hosted version from WordPress.com.
Design. Blog look and feel is currently derived from a theme called “Almost Spring”, which you can find here. WordPress’ main site lists many other themes.
Spam. Blog comments tend to attract spammers. I use Akismet, another free WordPress plugin, to find and destroy spam. It works incredibly well, with almost no false positives. Staying spam-free is easy.
Tags. UltimateTagWarrior is a great WordPress extension that helps you add tags to blog posts and display a tag cloud. This screenshot shows you the current tag cloud for MyOwnPirateRadio:
Tags are a useful way to discover posts, as opposed to text search or looking through chronological archives. The tag cloud display gives you an immediate feel for the topical content. And as a publisher I can add nerdy references like this to my posts: all blog posts related to business models.
Comment Discovery: Brian’s Latest Comments is a nifty little plugin that displays an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them. Here’s a screenshot:
Statistics: Stats packages help build a picture of which sites refer traffic to a blog, and which content on a blog is most popular. My web hoster offers a popular statistics package called AwStats. I also use StatTraq which is a WordPress plug-in. StatTraq is a little better at giving blog post-level details, so I use it more often than AwStats. I triangulate between the two sets of statistics, since there are often significant differences. I’ve also tried Google Analytics and found it to be slow and inaccurate. It’s a little hard knowing which numbers to trust.
Web hosting: I host my blog with iPowerWeb. They have proven to be a great Web host over the last few years; inexpensive rates, good support, high reliability, and excellent flexibility about what software you put on your server. If you’re looking to build a custom web site of any sort you should take a look at iPowerWeb. Thanks Craig L for that reference.
Email digest. Some people prefer getting blog content via email instead of RSS. To enable this I’m experimenting with FeedBurner Email Subscription Service. I just did a post on it, which you can read here. FeedBurner also promises a few other benefits to do with blog stats and caching; jury is out on that.
Grant Total Cost: $7.95 per month, which is iPowerWeb’s hosting fee. Everything else is free.
Email and RSS updates