Sometime last week, Amazon soft launched Amazon SimpleDB, a hosted service for storing and querying structured data. This release plugged a hole in their hosted Web services offerings which include the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon’s goal of becoming the “Web OS” upon which the next generation of Web startups builds upon came off as hollow when all they gave you was BLOB storage and hosted computation but not structured storage. With SimpleDB, they’re almost at the point where all the tools you need for building the next del.icio.us or Flickr can be provided by Amazon’s Web Services. The last bit they need to provide is actual Web hosting so that developers don’t need to resort to absurd dynamic DNS hacks when interacting with their Amazon applications from the Web.

The Good: Comoditizing hosted services and getting people to think outside the relational database box

The data model of SimpleDB is remarkably similar to Google’s BigTable in that instead of having multiple tables and relations between them, you get a single big giant table which is accessed via the tuple of {row key, column key}. Although, both SimpleDB and BigTable allow applications to store multiple values for a particular tuple, they do so in different ways. In BigTable, multiple values are additionally keyed by timestamp so I can access data such using tuples such as {”http://www.example.com”,  “incoming_links”, “12–12–2007”}. In Amazon’s SimpleDB I’d simply be able to store multiple values for a particular key pair so I could access {”Dare Obasanjo”, “weblogs”} and it would return (“http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog”, “http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo”, “http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com”).

Another similarity that both systems share, is that there is no requirement that all “rows” in a table share the same schema nor is there an explicit notion of declaring a schema. In SimpleDB, tables are called domains, rows are called items and the columns are called attributes. 

It is interesting to imagine how this system evolved. From experience, it is clear that everyone who has had to build a massive relational database that database joins kill performance. The longer you’ve dealt with massive data sets, the more you begin to fall in love with denormalizing your data so you can scale. Taking to its logical extreme, there’s nothing more denormalized than a single table. Even better, Amazon goes a step further by introducing multivalued columns which means that SimpleDB isn’t even in First Normal Form whereas we all learned in school that the minimum we should aspire to is Third Normal Form.

I think it is great to see more mainstream examples that challenge the traditional thinking of how to store, manage and manipulate large amounts of data.

I also think the pricing is very reasonable. If I was a startup founder, I’d strongly consider taking Amazon Web Services for a spin before going with a traditional LAMP or WISC approach.  

The Bad: Eventual Consistency and Data Values are Weakly Typed

The documentation for the PutAttributes method has the following note

Because Amazon SimpleDB makes multiple copies of your data and uses an eventual consistency update model, an immediate GetAttributes or Query request (read) immediately after a DeleteAttributes or PutAttributes request (write) might not return the updated data.

This may or may not be a problem depending on your application. It may be OK for a del.icio.us style application if it took a few minutes before your tag updates were applied to a bookmark but the same can’t be said for an application like Twitter. What would be useful for developers would be if Amazon gave some more information around the delayed propagation such as average latency during peak and off-peak hours.

There is another interesting note in the documentation of the Query method which states

 Lexicographical Comparison of Different Data Types

Amazon SimpleDB treats all entities as UTF-8 strings. Keep this in mind when storing and querying different data types, such as numbers or dates. Design clients to convert their data into an appropriate string format, so that query expression return expected results.

The following are suggested methods for converting different data types into strings for proper lexicographical order enforcement:

  • Positive integers should be zero-padded to match the largest number of digits in your data set. For example, if the largest number you are planning to use in a range is 1,000,000, every number that you store in Amazon SimpleDB should be zero-padded to at least 7 digits. You would store 25 as 0000025, 4597 as 0004597, and so on.

  • Negative integers should be offset and turned into positive numbers and zero-padded. For example, if the smallest negative integer in your data set is -500, your application should add at least 500 to every number that you store. This ensures that every number is now positive and enables you to use the zero-padding technique.

  • To ensure proper lexicographical order, convert dates to the ISO 8601 format.

[Note] Note

Amazon SimpleDB provides utility functions within our sample libraries that help you perform these conversions in your application.

This is ghetto beyond belief. I should know ahead of time what the lowest number will be in my data set and add/subtract offsets from data values when inserting and retrieving them from SimpleDB? I need to know the largest number in my data set and zero pad to that length? Seriously, WTF?

It’s crazy just thinking about the kinds of bugs that could be introduced into applications because of this wacky semantics and the recommended hacks to get around them. Even if this is the underlying behavior of SimpleDB, Amazon should have fixed this up in an APIs layer above SimpleDB then exposed that instead of providing ghetto helper functions in a handful of popular programming languages then crossing their fingers hoping that no one hits this problem.  

The Ugly: Web Interfaces, that Claim to be RESTful but Aren’t

I’ve talked about APIs that claim to be RESTful but aren’t in the past but Amazon’s takes the cake when it comes to egregious behavior. Again, from the documentation for the PutAttributes method we learn

Sample Request

The following example uses PutAttributes on Item123 which has attributes (Color=Blue), (Size=Med) and (Price=14.99) in MyDomain. If Item123 already had the Price attribute, this operation would replace the values for that attribute.

https://sdb.amazonaws.com/
?Action=PutAttributes
&Attribute.0.Name=Color&Attribute.0.Value=Blue
&Attribute.1.Name=Size&Attribute.1.Value=Med
&Attribute.2.Name=Price&Attribute.2.Value=14.99
&Attribute.2.Replace=true
&AWSAccessKeyId=[valid access key id]
&DomainName=MyDomain
&ItemName=Item123
&SignatureVersion=1
&Timestamp=2007-06-25T15%3A03%3A05-07%3A00
&Version=2007-11-07
&Signature=gabYTEXUgY%2Fdg817JBmj7HnuAA0%3D

Sample Response

<PutAttributesResponse xmlns="http://sdb.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-11-07">
  <ResponseMetadata>
    <RequestId>490206ce-8292-456c-a00f-61b335eb202b</RequestId>
    <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage>
  </ResponseMetadata>
</PutAttributesResponse>

Wow. A GET request with a parameter called Action which modifies data? What is this, 2005? I thought we already went through the realization that GET requests that modify data are bad after the Google Web Accelerator scare of 2005?

Of course, I'm not the only one that thinks this is ridonkulous. See similar comments from Stefan Tilkov, Joe Gregorio, and Steve Loughran. Methinks, someone at Amazon needs to go read some guidelines on building RESTful Web services.

Bonus points to Subbu Allamaraju for refactoring the SimpleDB API into a true RESTful Web service

Speaking of ridonkulous APIs trends, it seems the SimpleDB Query method follows the lead of the Google Base GData API in stuffing a SQL-like query language into the query string parameters of HTTP GET requests. I guess it is RESTful, but Damn is it ugly.

Now playing: J. Holiday - Suffocate


 

Categories: Platforms | XML Web Services

Two days ago a bug was filed in the RSS Bandit bug tracker that claimed that Slashdot is banning RSS Bandit users because the application is acting like a Denial of Service client. The root cause of the problem is a bug in the logic for downloading favicons where the application repeatedly attempts to download favicons from each site in your subscription list if there is an error accessing or processing one of the favicons in your list of subscriptions.

We will be releasing version 1.6.0.0 of RSS Bandit this weekend which remedies this problem. I plan to spend all of Saturday fixing as many bugs as I can and polishing up the Top Stories feature. We will likely ship the release sometime on Sunday. It should be noted that this release will be the first version RSS Bandit that will require version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework or later.

I’d like to apologize to everyone who has been inconvenienced by this issue. Thanks for your support and the great feedback you’ve been sending us.

Now playing: Cool Breeze - Watch for the Hook (Dungeon Family Remix) (feat. Outkast & Goodie Mob)


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

In the past three months, I’ve seen three moves by Google that highlight that not only is their strategic vision becoming more questionable but their engineering talent has also begun to show signs of being seriously deficient

This year is going to be a watershed year for the company. They are eroding a lot of the geek cred they’ve built up over the past decade. That will be hard to regain once it is lost.

In the meantime, I’ve noticed an uptick in the quiet smart folks you don’t see heralded in blogs turning down offers from Google and picking another horse when the job offers come knocking. Watershed year, indeed.

Now playing: John Legend - I Can Change (feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg)


 

December 19, 2007
@ 03:14 PM

I’m now at the point where I really, really, really want to blog but have too much going on at work and at home to take the time out to do it. To deal with this I’ve created a Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life.

Things I’ll eventually write about in my blog

  • Amazon Simple DB
  • A new release of RSS Bandit shipping this weekend
  • Thoughts on integrating RSS Bandit and Google Reader based on information found from the pyrfeed documentation 
  • Expressiveness of Python vs. C# 3.0

In the meantime, you can get my thoughts on various topics in 140 characters or less from Twitter.

PS: I’m amazed at how obnoxious Twitter is about collecting the password to your GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc account so it can spam your friends. At first glance, it looked as if it wouldn’t even let me use the service until I gave up those passwords. This crap has gotten out of hand.

PPS: Anyone got decent recommendations for a Twitter client that works on Vista and XP?

Now playing: N.W.A. - Real N*ggaz Don't Die


 

Categories: Personal

December 17, 2007
@ 05:52 PM

Recently my Cingular 3125 crapped out and I picked up an AT&T Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser) which I've already developed a love<->hate relationship with. I'd originally considered getting an iPhone but quickly gave up that dream when I realized it didn't integrate well with Microsoft Exchange. When you attend 3 - 5 meetings a day, having a phone that can tell you the room number, topic and attendees of your next meeting as you hop, skip and jump from meeting room to meeting room is extremely useful.

There's a lot I like about the phone. The QWERTY keyboard and wide screen make writing emails and browsing the Web a much better experience than on my previous phone. In addition, being able flip out the keyboard & tilt the screen is a spiffy enough effect that it gets ooohs and aaahs from onlookers the first time you do it. Another nice touch is that there are shortcut keys for Internet Explorer, your message center and the Start menu. When I was trying out the phone, the AT&T sales person said I'd become hooked on using those buttons and he was right, without them using the phone would be a lot more cumbersome.

There are some features specific to Windows Mobile 6 that I love. The first is that I can use any MP3, WAV or AAC file as a ringtone. After spending $2.50 for a 20 second snippet of a song I already owned and not being able to re-download the song after switching phones, I decided I wanted no part of this hustle from the cell phone companies. All I needed to do was download MP3 Cutter and I have as many ringtones as I have songs on my iPod. They've also fixed the bug from Windows Mobile 5 where if your next appointment shown on the home screen is for a day other than the current day, clicking on it takes you today's calendar instead of the calendar for that day. My phone also came with Office Mobile which means I can actually read all those Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs I get in email all the time.

So what do I dislike about this phone? The battery life is ridiculously short. My phone is consistently out of battery life at the end of the work day. I've never had this problem with the half dozen phones I've had over the past decade. What's even more annoying is that unlike every other phone I've ever seen, there is no battery life indicator on the main screen. Instead I have to navigate to Start menu->Settings->System->Power if I want to check my battery life. On the other hand, there are redundant indicators showing whether I am on the EDGE or 3G networks where the battery indicator used to be in Windows Mobile 5. Another problem is that voice dialing is cumbersome and often downright frustrating. There is a great rant about this in the post What's Wrong With Windows Mobile and How WM7 and WM8 Are Going to Fix It on Gizmodo which is excerpted below

the day-to-day usage of Windows Mobile isn't what you'd call "friendly," either. In fact, it'd probably punch you in the face if you even made eye contact. Take dialing, for instance. How can the main purpose of a phone—calling someone—be so hard to do?

...

If you're using a Windows Mobile Professional device, you have a few options, none of which are good:

• You can pull out the stylus to tap in the digits. This requires two hands.

• You can try and use your fingertip to call, which doesn't normally work, so you'll use your fingernail, which does work but, as it results in many misdialed numbers, takes forever.

• You can slide out the keyboard and find the dialpad buried among the QWERTY keys and dial, which requires two hands and intense concentration.

• You can try and bring up the contact list, which takes a long-ass time to scroll through, or you can slide out the keyboard again and search by name. Again, two hands.

• Voice Command has been an option for years, but then again, it kinda works, but it doesn't work well.

• Probably the best way to go is to program your most important numbers into speed dial, as you'll be able to actually talk to the correct person within, say, three button presses.

Compare that to the iPhone, which has just a touchscreen, but gets you to the keypad, your favorites, recent calls or your contact list, all within two key presses of the home screen.

It's amazing to me that there are five or six different options if you want to dial and call a number yet they all are a usability nightmare. One pet peeve that is missing from the Gizmodo rant is that when a call is connected, the keypad is hidden. This means that if you are calling any sort of customer service system (e.g. AT&T wireless, Microsoft's front desk, your cable company, etc) you need to first tap "Keypad" with your fingernail and then deal with the cumbersome dialpad.

So far, I like the phone more than I dislike it.  **** out of *****.

I'd love to see the next version of the iPhone ship with the ability to talk to Exchange and support for 3G, and see whether the next generation of Windows Mobile devices stack up.

Rihanna - Hate That I Love You (feat. Ne-Yo)


 

Categories: Technology

DISCLAIMER: This post does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or future intentions of my employer. These are solely my personal opinions. If you are seeking official position statements from Microsoft, please go here.

Last week, Microsoft announced Office Live Workspace which is billed as an online extension to Microsoft Office. Unsurprisingly, the word from the pundits has been uniformly negative especially when comparing it to Google Docs.

An example of the typical pundit reaction to this announcement is Ken Fisher's post on Ars Technica entitled Office Live Workspace revealed: a free 250MB "SharePoint Lite" for everyone where he writes

Office Live Workspace is not an online office suite. The aim of OLW is simple: give web-connected users a no-cost place to store, share, and collaborate on Office documents. To that end, the company will give registered users 250 MB of storage space, which can be used to store documents "in the cloud" or even "host" them for comments by other users equipped with just a web browser (you will be able to manage the access rights of other users). However, and this is important: you cannot create new Office documents with this feature nor can you edit documents beyond adding comments without having a copy of Microsoft Office installed locally.

As you can see, this is not a "Google Docs killer" or even an "answer" to Google Docs. This is not an online office suite, it's "software plus service." Microsoft's move here protects the company's traditional Office business, in that it's really positioned as a value-add to Office, rather than an Office alternative. Microsoft has seen success with its business-oriented SharePoint offering, and Microsoft is taking a kind of "SharePoint Lite" approach with OLW.

The focus of pundits on "an online office suite" and a "Google Docs Killer" completely misses the point when it comes to satisfy the needs of the end user. As a person who is a fan of the Google Docs approach, there are three things I like that it brings to the table

  • it is free for consumers and people with basic needs
  • it enables "anywhere access" to your documents
  • it requires zero install to utilize

The fact that it is Web-based and uses AJAX instead of Win32 code running on my desktop is actually a negative when it comes to responsiveness and feature set. However the functionality of Google Docs hits a sweet spot for a certain class of users authoring certain classes of documents. By the way, this is a textbook example of low-end disruption from Clay Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma". Taking a lesson from much another hyped business book, Money Ball, disruption often happens when the metrics used to judge successful products don't actually reflect the current realities of the market.  

The reality of today's market is that a lot of computer users access their data from multiple computers and perhaps their mobile device during the course of a normal day.  The paradigm of disconnected desktop software is an outdated relic that is dying away. Another reality of today's market is that end users have gotten used to being able to access and utilize world class software for free and without having to install anything thanks to the Googles, Facebooks and Flickrs of the world. When you put both realities together, you get the list of three bullet points above which are the key benefits that Google Docs brings to the table.

The question is whether there is anything Microsoft can do to stem what seems like inevitable disruption by Google Docs and if so, does Office Live Workspace improve the company's chances in any way? I believe the answer to both questions is Yes. If you are already a user of Microsoft's office productivity software then Office Live Workspace gives you a free way to get "anywhere access" to your documents without having to install anything even if the computer does not have Microsoft Office installed.

As I mentioned earlier, a number of pundits have been fairly dismissive of this and declared a no-contest victory for the Google Docs approach. Steven Burke has an article entitled Five Reasons Google Docs Beats Office Live Workspace where he lists a number of ways Google Docs compares favorably Microsoft Workspace. Of his list of five reasons, only one seems like a genuine road block that will hurt adoption by end users. Below are his reasons in bold with my comments underneath.

Steven Burke: Office Live Workspace Does Not Allow You To Create And Edit Documents Within A Web Page. Google Docs Does

This is a lame restriction. I assume this is to ensure that the primary beneficaries of this offering have purchased Microsoft Office (thus it is a software + services play instead of a software as a service play). I can understand the business reasons why this exists but it is often a good business strategy to cannibalize yourself before competitors do it especially when it is clear that such cannibalization is inevitable. The fact that I am tethered to Office in creating new documents is lame. I hope competitive pressure makes this "feature" go away.

Steven Burke: Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has A 250 Mbyte 1,000 Average Office Documents Limitation. Google Docs Does Not.

I don't worry to much about space limitations especially since this is in beta. If Microsoft can figure out how to give people 5GB of space for email in Hotmail and 1GB file storage space in SkyDrive all for FREE, I'm sure we can figure out how to give more than 250MB of storage to people who've likely spent hundreds of dollars buying our desktop software.  

Steven Burke: Microsoft's Office Live WorkSpace Is VaporWare. Google Docs is Real.

The vaporware allegation only makes sense if you think (a) it is never going to ship or (b) you need a solution today. If not, it is a product announcement like any other in the software industry meant to give people a heads up on what's coming down the line. If industry darlings like Apple and Google can get away with it, why single out Microsoft?

Steven Burke: You're Better Off Trusting Google Than Microsoft When It Comes To Web 2.0 Security Issues.

I don't know about you, but over the past year I've heard about several  security flaws in Google's AJAX applications including Cross Site Request Forgery issues in Gmail, leaking people's email addresses via the chat feature of Google presentations, cross site scripting issues that allowed people to modify your documents in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and lots more. On the flip side, I haven't heard about even half as many security issues in Microsoft's family of Web applications whether they are Office Live, MSN or Windows Live branded.

In fact, one could argue that trusting Google to keep your data secure in their AJAX applications is like trusting a degenerate gambler with your life savings. So far the company has proven to be inept at securing their online services which is problematic if they are pitching to store people's vital business documents.

Steven Burke: Office Live Workspace Is Optimized For Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint Data. Google Is Optimized For Web 2.0.

I guess this means Google's service is more buzzword compliant than Microsoft's. So what? At the end of the day, this most important thing is providing value to your customers not repping every buzzword that spews forth from the likes of Mike Arrington and Tim O'Reilly.  

Tomoyasu Hotei - Battle without Honor or Humanity


 

Categories: Technology

Jeff Atwood has a blog post entitled Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order where he writes

The default sort functions in almost every programming language are poorly suited for human consumption. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the difference between sorting filenames in Windows explorer, and sorting those very same filenames via Array.Sort() code:

Implementing a natural sort is more complex than it seems, and not just for the gnarly i20n issues I've hinted at, above. But the Python implementations are impressively succinct

I tried to come up with a clever, similarly succinct C# 3.0 natural sort implementation, but I failed. I'm not interested in a one-liner contest, necessarily, but it does seem to me that a basic natural sort shouldn't require the 40+ lines of code it takes in most languages.

Since I’m still in my “learning Python by mapping it to C#” phase I thought this should be a straightforward task. Below is the equivalent IronPython code for natural sort which is slightly modified from the code posted in Jeff’s post along with what I hoped to be a succint version in C# 2.0. It would definitely be shorter in C# 3.0 [which I don’t plan to start using for another year or so]. The Python snippet below takes advantage of some interesting rules around comparing lists of objects which don’t exist in C#. I’m sure I could reduce the size of the C# code while maintaining readability but my procrastination time is over and I need to get to work. Wink

Natural Sort in IronPython

import re

def sort_nicely( l ):
  """ Sort the given list in the way that humans expect. """
   
  convert = lambda x: x.isdigit() and int(x) or x
  alphanum = lambda key: [ convert(c) for c in re.split('([0-9]+)', key) ]
  l.sort( key=alphanum ) #serious magic happens here
  return l

print sort_nicely(["z22.txt", "z5.txt" , "z.txt", "z10.txt", "z300.txt", "z2.txt", "z11.txt", "y.txt", "z", "z4.txt", "za.txt" ])

Natural Sort in C# 2.0


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;


public class Test {


   ///<summary>Compare two lists of strings using Python rules and natural order semantics</summary>
  public static int NaturalCompare(IList<string> a, IList<string> b) {
    int y, z, len = (a.Count < b.Count ? a.Count : b.Count);

    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
      if (a[i].Equals(b[i])) continue;

      bool w = Int32.TryParse(a[i], out y), x = Int32.TryParse(b[i], out z);
      bool bothNumbers = w && x, bothNotNumbers = !w && !x;

      if (bothNumbers) return y.CompareTo(z);
      else if (bothNotNumbers) return a[i].CompareTo(b[i]);
      else if (w) return -1;
      else return 1; //numbers always less than words or letters
    }
    return (a.Count.CompareTo(b.Count)); //subset list is considered smaller 
  }

  public static List<string> SortNicely(List<string> list) {
    Regex re
= new Regex("([0-9]+)");
    list
.Sort(delegate(string x, string y) { return NaturalCompare(re.Split(x), re.Split(y)); });
    return list;
  }


  public static void Main(string[] args) {
    List<string> l = new List<string>(new string[] { "z.txt", "y.txt", "z22.txt", "z5.txt", "z10.txt", "z3.txt", "z2.txt", "za.txt", "z11.txt", "z400.txt" });
    foreach (string s in SortNicely(l)) Console.WriteLine(s);
  }
}

Now playing: Notorious B.I.G. - Real N*ggas Do Real Things


 

Categories: Programming

Yesterday I read about the Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture. My initial thoughts are that Facebook has done what Google claimed to have done but didn't with Open Social. Facebook seems to have provided detailed specs on how to build an interoperable widget platform unlike Google who unleashed a bunch of half baked REST API specs with no details about the "widget" aspect of the platform unless you are building an Orkut application.

As I've thought about this over the past few weeks, building a widget platform that is competitive with Facebook's is hard work. Remember all those stories about OpenSocial apps being hacked in 45 minutes or less? The problem was that sites like Plaxo Pulse and Ning simply didn't think through all the ramifications of building a widget platform and bumped up against the kind of "security 101" issues that widget platforms like Netvibes, iGoogle and Live.com gadgets solved years ago.  I started to wonder exactly how many of these social networking sites will be able to keep up with the capabilities and features of platforms like Facebook's and Orkut's when such development is outside their core competency.

In fact let's take a quote from the TechCrunch story First OpenSocial Application Hacked Within 45 Minutes 

theharmonyguy says he’s successfully hacked Facebook applications too, including the Superpoke app, but that it is more difficult:

Facebook apps are not quite this easy. The main issue I’ve found with Facebook apps is being able to access people’s app-related history; for instance, until recently, I could access the SuperPoke action feed for any user. (I could also SuperPoke any user; not sure if they’ve fixed that one. Finally, I can access all the SuperPoke actions - they haven’t fixed that one, but it’s more just for fun.) There are other apps where, last I checked, that was still an issue ( e.g. viewing anyone’s Graffiti posts).

But the way Facebook setup their platform, it’s tons harder to actually imitate a user and change profile info like this. I’m sure this kind of issue could be easily solved by some verification code on RockYou’s part, but it’s not inherent in the platform - unlike Facebook. I could do a lot more like this on FB if Facebook hadn’t set things up the way they did.

At that point I ask myself, how useful is it to have the specs for the platform if you aren't l337 enough to implement it yourself? [Update: It looks like Google is well aware of this problem and has launched an Apache project called Shindig which is meant to be an Open Source widget platform that implements the Open Social APIs. This obviously indicates that Google realizes the specs are worthless and instead shipping a reusable widget platform is the way to go. It’s interesting to note that with this move Google is attempting to be a software vendor, advertising partner and competitor to the Web’s social networking sites. That must lead to some confusing internal meetings. Smile ]

For now, Facebook has definitely outplayed Google here. The most interesting part of the Facebook announcement to me is

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins -- users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

it looks like Facebook plans to assert their Intellectual Property rights on anyone who clones their platform. This is one of the reasons I've found Open Social to be worrisome abuse of the term "open". Like Facebook, Google shipped specs for a proprietary platform whose copyrights, patents, etc belong to them. Any company that implements Open Social or even GData which it is built upon is using Google's intellectual property.

What's to stop Google from asserting these intellectual property rights the way Facebook is doing today? What exactly is "open" about it that makes it any less proprietary than what Facebook just announced?


 

danah boyd writes eloquently about the slippery slope we are now headed down thanks to way Facebook is influencing the design of social software applications when it comes to privacy. She writes in here post entitled Facebook's "opt-out" precedent

I've been watching the public outcry over Facebook's Beacon (social ads) program with great interest…For all of the repentance by Facebook, what really bugs me is that this is the third time that Facebook has violated people's sense of privacy in a problematic way.

In each incident, Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable. In other words, this is "slippery slope" software development.

I kinda suspect that Facebook loses very little when there is public outrage. They gain a lot of free press and by taking a step back after taking 10 steps forward, they end up looking like the good guy, even when nine steps forward is still a dreadful end result. This is how "slippery slopes" work and why they are so effective in political circles. Most people will never realize how much of their data has been exposed to so many different companies and people. They will still believe that Facebook is far more private than other social network sites (even though this is patently untrue). And, unless there is a large lawsuit or new legislation introduced, I suspect that Facebook will continue to push the edges when it comes to user privacy.

Lots of companies are looking at Facebook's success and trying to figure out how to duplicate it. Bigger companies are watching to see what they can get away with so that they too can take that path.

I’ve stated before that one of my concerns about Beacon is that it legitimizes what is truly worrying behavior when it comes to companies respecting people’s privacy on the Web. As it stands now we have companies thinking it is OK to send out information about money you are loaning to your friend and that it is OK to violate federal legislation and share information about movies you have rented to watch in the privacy of your home without user consent.

This is an unprecedented degree of violation of the sanctity of the customer’s private Web experience. What I find sad is that not only are the technology unsavvy giving up their privacy on the Web in a way that they would never accept in meat space, but that even the technological savvy who know what is going on just assume it is par for the course. For example, see comments by John Dowdell of Adobe who implies that we were already led down this slippery slope by DoubleClick in the 90s and this is just the natural progression.

I actually worry less about Facebook and more about what happens when the Googles, DoubleClicks, Microsofts, and Yahoos of the world decide that “If Facebook can get away with it, we should do it too especially if we want to stay competitive”. In that world, your privacy and mine becomes collateral damage in the chase after the almighty dollar euro.

Now playing: Ashanti - Unfoolish (feat. Notorious B.I.G.)


 

Categories: Social Software

Things have been progressing well with RSS Bandit development recently. Some of our recent changes seem so valuable to me that I’ve been flirting with throwing out all our plans for Phoenix and shipping a new release right away. That’s how much I like the personalized meme tracking feature. I also fixed a bug where we continually fetch favicons for all your feeds if one of the sites in your subscriptions gives us an invalid image when we fetch its favicon. This bug affects me personally since a lot of RSS Bandit users are subscribed to my site and are polling my favicons several times an hour instead of once every startup or less. 

Despite those thoughts, we will continue with our plan to add the top 5 features for the next version of RSS Bandit which I blogged about last month. I need to do some fit & finish work this weekend on the meme tracking feature and then it is on to the next set of tasks. Torsten will be looking at ways to add UI for managing your pending and downloaded podcasts. I will be working on adding support for treating the Windows RSS platform and Newsgator Online as “Feed Sources”. This will mean that you can use RSS Bandit in standalone mode and as a desktop client for feeds that you are either sharing with Newsgator applications  (FeedDemon, NewsGator Online, Net News Wire, etc) or Windows RSS platform applications (Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007, etc).

For a long time, people have been asking for me to treat services like Newsgator Online in the same way an email client like Outlook treats mail servers like Exchange instead of the arms length degree of integration I’ve done in the past. It’s taken a while but I’m now going to go ahead and do just that.  

With that done, we’d probably have enough new features to ship an alpha and start getting initial feedback. I estimate that this will happen sometime in the first quarter of 2008. I also plan to go over our backlog of bugs during the holiday season and will knock out as many as I can before the alpha.

If you have any questions or comments, fire away. I’m all ears.

Now playing: Scarface - Diary of a Madman


 

Categories: RSS Bandit