Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch let's us know Digg API Visualization Contest Delivers Apollo Powered Applications, specifically

The Digg API Visualization Contest held to celebrate the launch of the Digg API is now in its final stages with 10 shortlisted candidates.

Four of the ten finalists are Abode Apollo based applications, remarkable for a platform launched just over 2 months ago.

Agreed, it's pretty remarkable to see so many desktop applications in a Web mashup contest. As John Dowdell warns in his post Apollo ain't casual an Apollo application is a desktop app with all the security implications that come with that. So it is definitely impressive and a little scary to see so many people downloading random executables off of the Web and voting for them in what you'd expect to be a Web-based mashup contest.

It's also somewhat interesting that all the apps seem to be written using some variation of the Flash platform; Apollo, Flex or Flash Lite. I guess it just goes to show that for snazzy data visualization, you really can't beat Flash today. On reading the contest rules it seems it's sponsored by Adobe given that the prizes are primarily Adobe products and submissions are required to be written in Flash. Too bad, it would have been interesting to see some AJAX/DHTML or Silverlight visualizations going up against the Flash apps. 

 

I've been reading the Google Data APIs blog for a few months and have been impressed at how Google has been quietly executing on the plan of having a single uniform RESTful Web service interface to their various services. If you are unfamiliar with GData, you can read the GData overview documentation. In a nutshell, GData is Google's implementation of the Atom 1.0 syndication format and the Atom Publishing Protocol with some extensions. It is a RESTful XML-based protocol for reading and writing information on the Web. Currently one can use GData to manipulate and access data from the following Google services

• Google Apps Provisioning
• Google Base
• Blogger
• Google Calendar
• Google Code Search
• Google Notebook
• Google Spreadsheets
• Picasa Web Albums

with more on the way. Contrast this with the API efforts on Yahoo! Developer Network or Windows Live Dev which are an inconsistent glop of incompatible RESTful protocols, SOAP APIs and XML-RPC methods all under the same roof. In the Google case, an app that can read and write data to Blogger can also do so to Google Calendar or Picasa Web Albums with minimal changes. This is not the case when using APIs provided by two Yahoo! services (e.g. Flickr and del.icio.us) or two Windows Live services (e.g. Live Search and Windows Live Spaces) which use completely different protocols, object models and authentication mechanisms even though provided by the same vendor.

One way to smooth this disparity is to provide client libraries that aim to provide a uniform interface to all of the vendors services. However even in that case, the law of leaky abstractions holds. Thus the fact that these services use different protocols, object models and authentication mechanisms ends up surfacing in the client library. Secondly, not only is it now possible to create a single library that knows how to talk to all of Google's existing and future Web services since they all use GData. It is also a lot easier to provide "tooling" for these services than it would be for Yahoo's family of Web services given that they use a simple and uniform interface. So far none of the big Web vendors have done a good job of providing deep integration with popular development environments like Eclipse or Visual Studio. However I suspect that when they do, Google will have an easier time than the others due to the simplicity and uniform interface that is GData.

 

Via Robert Scoble's blog post entitled Microsoft postpones PDC we learn

Mary Jo Foley (she’s been covering Microsoft for a long time) has the news: Microsoft has postponed the PDC that it had planned for later this year.

The PDC stands for “Professional Developer’s Conference.” It happens only when Microsoft knows it’ll have a major new platform to announce. Usually a new version of Windows or a new Internet strategy.

So, this means a couple of things: no new Windows and no major new Internet strategy this year.
...
Now that Google, Amazon, Apple, are shipping platforms that are more and more interesting to Microsoft’s developer community Microsoft has to play a different game. One where they can’t keep showing off stuff that never ships. The stakes are going up in the Internet game and Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a good answer to what’s coming next.

Interesting analysis from Robert, I agree with him that Microsoft no longer has the luxury of demoing platforms it can't or won't ship given how competent a number of competitors have shown themselves on the platform front. The official Microsoft cancellation notice states

As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed "Katmai", Visual Studio codenamed "Orcas" and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch

This makes sense, all the interesting near term future stuff has already been announced at other recent events. In fact, when you think about it, it is kinda weird for Microsoft to have a conference for showing next generation Web platform stuff (i.e. MIX) and another for showing general next generation platform stuff (i.e. PDC). Especially since the Web is the only platform that matters these days.

My assumption is that Microsoft conference planners will figure this out and won't make the mistake of scheduling MIX and PDC a few months from each other next time.
 

Every couple of months I like to give a shout out to the blogs I'm currently reading and think are worth recommending. Below is my current list of top five blogs.

1. Jeff Atwood: Every modern developer worth their salt should have read Mythical Man-Month, should know the common refactorings by heart, and should be reading Jeff Atwood's blog. It's that good. He covers a broad range of topics which are always of interest to developers from interesting glimpses into our shared computing history in posts such as Meet The Inventor of the Mouse Wheel and EA's Software Artists to excellent advice on designing applications for non-programmers such as his post Reducing User Interface Friction as well as a the occasional rant on pet peeves that a lot of developers share such as when he pointed out C# and the Compilation Tax.

2. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : This is the best fake celebrity blog I've ever seen. The author is definitely up on his knowledge of Steve Jobs and Apple. The funniest posts are the ones where he gives an [evil] Steve Jobs perspective on current Apple affairs in posts such as So, you leaked an email to Engadget?, They call me Mr. Integrity and . Congratulations, Jon Ive

3. Pat Helland: An old school Microsoft architect from Developer Division who recently came back to Microsoft after a two year stint at Amazon. Before leaving Microsoft two years ago, Pat wrote some well respected articles on building distributed systems such as Metropolis & Data on the Outside vs. Data on the Inside. He has now come back to the company with some practical experience from working on one of the largest Web sites on the planet. His most recent post, SOA and Newton's Universe, introduced me to the CAP Conjecture. Consistency, Availability, and Partition-tolerance. Pick two. Specifically, trying to maintain data consistency in a distributed system is in direct opposition to having high availability. I'd observed anecdotally while working on services in Windows Live but it was still interesting to read papers explaining this complete with mathematical proofs of why this is the case.

4. Uncov: This site picks up where Dead 2.0 left off as the anti-TechCrunch by attempting to inject some snarky reality in the face of all the overhyped, me too, built to flip, "Web 2.0" startups we keep hearing about these days. Some of the more amusing recent posts are Meebo: Yahoo Chat was awesome in 1997, Mpire: Liked It Better When It Was Called Pricewatch and of course Web 2.0: So great you can't define it.

5. Casey Serin: Since I recently became a homeowner, I've become interested in all this talk of real estate collapses and subprime loan crises. The USA Today article 10 mistakes that made flipping a flop describes Casey Serin as a poster child for everything that went wrong in the real estate boom. In under a year, the 24-year-old website-designer-turned-real estate-flipper bought eight homes in four states — and in every case but one, he put no money down. Over half of the homes have been foreclosed and he now has over $140,000 in debt. His blog documents his trials and tribulations trying to get out of debt. The comments are the best part, it seems his audience is split down the middle between people who cheer him for trying to get out of debt and others who attack him for seemingly getting away with abusing the system.

Do you have any similar recommendations?

 

From Mike Arrington's post $100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed we learn

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

I use FeedBurner to track stats for my blog and RSS feed so this is great news because it means the service is here to stay. I've exchanged mail with Eric Lunt a bunch of times about issues I've had with the service and he was always quick to respond with a solution or an ETA for a fix. Google has landed some great folks who built a killer service.

I hope now that they have Google level resources at their disposal users of the service can now get historical statistics for their blogs and feeds instead of being limited to only the last 30 days. I'm curious about what my most popular posts of all time are not just the most popular in the last 30 days. 

 

Thanks to books like the Innovators Dilemma it is now an oft repeated bit of business lore, especially within the technology industry, that you should kill your cash cows before two guys in a garage do it for you. The skeptic in me suspects that this bit of industry truism is part of The Halo Effect at work. People have sought out examples that confirm this statement and ignored the hundreds of counter-examples that show how dangerous this kind of thinking can be to a business.

Recently I wrote a blog post entitled Arguing Intelligently About Copyright on the Internet which addressed some of the most common anti-copyright arguments you see on the Web on sites such as TechDirt. Mike Masnick of TechDirt, took umbrage at my post and followed up with a comment to my post as well as a TechDirt article entitled The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free. In the article, Mike Masnick makes a number of assertions that are similar to the truism around killing your cash cows.

Mike Masnick writes

First off, and this is key, none of what I put forth is about defending unauthorized downloads. I don't download unauthorized content (never have) and I certainly don't suggest you do either. You may very well end up in a lawsuit and you may very well end up having to pay a lot of money. It's just not a good idea. This whole series is from the other perspective -- from that of the content creator and hopefully explaining why they should encourage people to get their content for free. That's because of two important, but simple points:

1. If done correctly, you can increase your market-size greatly.
2. If you don't, someone else will do it correctly, and your existing business model will be in serious trouble

If that first point is explained clearly, then hopefully the second point becomes self-evident. However, many people immediately ask, how is it possible that giving away a product can guarantee that you've increased your market size? The first thing to understand is that we're never suggesting people just give away content and then hope and pray that some secondary market will grant them money. Giving stuff away for free needs to be part of a complete business model that recognizes the economic realities. We'll get to more details on that in a second.

As a business, increasing your market size is nice but maintaining your profits is even nicer. If you have 200,000 customers and make $80 profit per customer, would you be interested in doubling your customer base while making $20 profit per customer due to lowering your prices? The point here is that simply increasing the size of your market or the number of your customers does not translate to increasing the business's bottom line. As for the second point listed above, healthy paranoia is good but it shouldn't replace good business sense. After all, the list of successful fast followers includes some of the biggest companies in the world. If it worked for Google and Microsoft, it can work for your business.

Mike Masnick also outlines his business advice for purveyors of intellectual property digital content which is excerpted below

So, the simple bulletpoint version:

1. Redefine the market based on the benefits
2. Break the benefits down into scarce and infinite components.
3. Set the infinite components free, syndicate them, make them easy to get -- all to increase the value of the scarce components
4. Charge for the scarce components that are tied to infinite components

You can apply this to almost any market (though, in some it's more complex than others). Since this post is already way too long, we'll just take an easy example of the recording industry:

1. Redefine the market: The benefit is musical enjoyment
2. Break the benefits down (not a complete list...): Infinite components: the music itself. Scarce components: access to the musicians, concert tickets, merchandise, creation of new songs, CDs, private concerts, backstage passes, time, anyone's attention, etc. etc. etc.
3. Set the infinite components free: Put them on websites, file sharing networks, BitTorrent, social network sites wherever you can, while promoting the free songs and getting more publicity for the band itself -- all of which increases the value for the final step
4. Charge for the scarce components: Concert tickets are more valuable. Access to the band is more valuable. Getting the band to write a special song (sponsorship?) is more valuable. Merchandise is more valuable.

What the band has done in this case is use the infinite good to increase the value of everything else they have to offer.

The implicit assumption that Mike Masnick makes here is that losing the profits from cheaply copyable and easily distributed digital content will be made up by selling goods and services that is related to the digital content. I am highly suspicious of the theory that replacing the profits CDs, digital music and ringtone sales with the profits from increasing concert ticket prices ends up being a net positive for successful musicians.  The key reason for this is that,  there are physical limits on how many concerts a band can have or how many people can attend in a given location but such limits barely exist with regards to distributing digital content.

A concrete example is comparing the relative profits of the proprietary software companies with the Open Source software companies. In a recent blog post entitled The 'we win by killing' days are passing Tim O'Reilly wrote

1. Pure open source software businesses are orders of magnitude less profitable than their closed source brethren even as they close in on them in terms of the number of customers. (Compare Red Hat and Microsoft, MySQL and Oracle.) Meanwhile, companies built on top of open source but with new layers of closed source (iconically, Google) are building the kinds of outsized profits that once were the sole province of old style software companies. As growth slows, as it inevitably will (even if it takes another decade), these companies too will seek to maintain their outsized profits.

2. Outsized profits come from lock-in of one kind or another. Yes, there are companies that have no lock-in that gain outsized profits merely by means of scale, but they are few and far between.

The experiences of the software industry seem to contradict Mike Masnick's diagnoses and recommendations for the music industry. Giving away your most valuable asset and hoping to make it up by selling peripheral services and add-ons is more likely to destroy your company than become your redemption.

Counter arguments welcome.

 

Pete Lacey has a blog post entitled Rethinking Apollo where he writes

So I dug around in Apollo a little bit, and I did a little bit more thinking about my reflexive dismissal of the technology. And I admit to misunderstanding and miscategorizing Apollo. Here’s what I learned.

Apollo is not a browser plugin, nor does it leverage or extend your browser in any way. It runs completely outside the browser. It is a run-time environment for building cross-platform desktop applications.
...
Lets say you want to build a RSS/Atom reader...But lets add a requirement: my news reader must be cross-platform. That eliminates .NET as a development platform, but still leaves C++. However, with C++ I have to carefully separate my common functionality from my OS-specific functionality and become more of an expert on OS and windowing quirks then I would like, so that’s out. Fortunately, there’s quite a few other ways to go:

1. Browser based
2. Java based
3. Dynamic language based: Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl
4. Native cross-platform development environment, e.g Qt
5. Apollo
6. Others, e.g. Eclipse RCP

All of these have pros and cons. Browsers are limited in functionality, and quirky. Java is a pain to develop towards-especially GUI apps, has spotty HTML rendering ability, and a non-native look and feel. The dynamic languages are far from guaranteed to be installed on any particular machine—especially Windows machines, and (likely) also have their own look and feel issues. Qt still leaves me in C++ land; that is it’s hard to develop towards. Apollo also has its own look and feel, and will require a download of the runtime environment if it’s not already there (I’m ignoring its alpha release state). I don’t care about any others cross-platform techniques right now.

I think I've found interesting is how a lot of blogosphere pundits have been using Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Apollo in the same sentence as if they are similar products. I guess it's more proof that the popular technology blog pundits don't do much research and in many cases aren't technical enough to do the research anyway.

Although Pete does a good job of explaining the goals of Adobe Apollo with a great example, I think there is a simpler and more cynical way of spelling out the difference between Silverlight and Apollo. I'd describe the projects as 

Apollo is Adobe's Flash based knock off competitor to the .NET Framework while Silverlight is Microsoft's .NET Framework based knock off competitor to the Flash platform.

A lot shorter and more to the point. :)

PS: Shame on Pete for equating dynamic languages with the runtimes for certain popular Open Source dynamic programming languages. The programming language is not the platform and vice versa. After all, both Jython and IronPython are instances of a dynamic programming language that don't have any of the problems he listed as reasons to eliminate a dynamic programming language as a choice for building a cross-platform desktop application. :). 

 

I believe we're on track to release a new version of RSS Bandit by the end of the month. Besides the bug fixes there are two minor features we are adding. The screenshot below showss the options dialog that controls them.

The first new feature, is a fix that should fix a number of the performance problems people have when they read feeds with lots of unread items. Currently we display all the unread items in the reading pane when you click on a feed. Although this makes it convenient to read the unread items in the feed, it can take a while to render in the embedded Web browser if there are a lots of posts. To remedy this, we've introduced pagination to the reading pane. By default, we'll now show only 10 unread items per page and users can configure this to what best suits their needs.

The second feature, is actually the ability to turn off an existing feature. In the current release, the default stylesheet mimics Google Reader in that items are automatically marked as read as you scroll through the reading pane. Although a lot of our users liked the feature, a number of our users asked for a way to disable this feature. You asked, so we've delivered.

Our main problem now is how to change the CSS/HTML for the reading pane to introduce [previous page] and [next page] navigation links without making it look ugly. My CSS design skills are pretty lame.

 

A couple of months ago, John Montgomery gave me an invite to test drive a new Microsoft project that was billed as a mashup builder. It's been on my list of "cool things at Microsoft I've been asked to check out but never investigated deeply enough" for about three months [until recently this list also included Microsoft Scout]. Thus I was quite surprised when I found out that the project was already ready for release and had been renamed Popfly.

The most succinct description of the project I've seen is Mike Arrington's writeup in his post Microsoft Launches Popfly: Mashup App Creator Built On Silverlight which stated

Microsoft will announce the private beta launch of Popfly this morning, a new Silverlight application that allows users to create mashups, widgets and other applications using a very cool and easy to use web-based graphical interface.
...
Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services.

See additional screen shots and a link to a screencast on the Popfly overview page here.

The application is an impressive mashup builder. It's at least on par with Yahoo! Pipes or maybe even better since it lets you mash up not just RSS feeds but also APIs from dozens of different sources including Flickr, Digg, Twitter, XBox Live and Windows Live spaces among others. Did I mention that it is also a great demo of the capabilities of Silverlight? Damn, the Microsoft developer division folks are outdoing themselves in 2007 and it isn't even June yet.

John Montgomery has a roundup of all the recent posts about Popfly in his blog post Some of the Popfly News So Far. I've been told I have three invites to the service to give out. The first three non-Microsoft people to ping me at my work email address can have them. The invitations are gone.

Kudos to the Popfly team on such a kick ass release.

 

This movie might not suck after all.

Just in case this gets taken down, you can also find the trailer (in HD) at http://movies.yahoo.com/summer-movies/Transformers/1808716430/trailers/31