Comments On Google Changes
Image via WikipediaOn Wednesday, Google announced changes to or shutdowns of several services. Google also shut down Lively, the 3D chatroom that I always looked upon as a rather silly Second Life knock-off, beginning January 1 — just a few short weeks ago. ("Reasons Google should kill Lively" was actually a topic in my to-blog list for several months, but it looks like I didn't have to blog about it for Google to see that it wasn't a good fit with their other projects. Nice work saving effort there, self. 
Anyway...)
I'm rather unconcerned with the fate of Google Catalog Search, which was (I believe) really just a good way to work on the OCR technology Google now uses in Book Search. (Catalog Search's former homepage at catalogs.google.com now redirects to Google's main site.) I never used it; catalogs are pretty useless these days anyway what with online shopping and Froogle (now known by the much-less-punny appellation of Google Product Search and accessed by a link in the Google header called "Shopping", though I wish they'd bring back the old name).
Image via CrunchBaseAlso of little real consequence to me, personally, is the development stoppage on Google Notebook. I don't use it much, and my service will be unaffected anyway. Well, relatively unaffected, at any rate. When I do use Notebook, it's usually in conjunction with the "Clip" function of the accompanying Firefox extension — which will no longer work. But the service will continue for now as long as one already has an account.
I'm actually somewhat glad to hear of Dodgeball.com closing and Jaiku being open-sourced. Dodgeball was a premature service somewhat like Brightkite — which I occasionally use — that stagnated almost immediately after being acquired by Google in 2005. Its interface has always been phone-only (Brightkite allows use via text message, Web interface, or iPhone/iPod-Touch – optimized site). In my opinion, Google would do well to encourage Dodgeball's users to move to Brightkite. An agreement with Brightkite to ease the transition for users willing to make the switch would likely make Dodgeball's death as swift and painless as possible.
Image via CrunchBaseJaiku has also stagnated, the most notable annoyance being that it has been invite-only since its acquisition in 2007. With the transition to open-source (the service will continue to be run by a team of volunteer Googlers), Laconica1 might get some new features, competition, or perhaps both. Twitter may also be encouraged to develop long-overdue features like OAuth support, since Jaiku is slated to support OAuth right out of the gate when it is released to the open-source community. (Securely logging into Twitter from third-party applications and websites has long been a point of contention in the community, because the only option continues to be giving every app your username and password. Not a very secure solution, especially because there isn't even the layer of security provided by API keys such as used by FriendFeed and, yes, Jaiku. Google itself has supported OAuth authentication for its own services since as long as I can remember.)
Overall I think Jaiku's fate is the best and most (potentially) beneficial of all those announced this week. The potential for competition and improvement in the entire microblogging and status-update ecosystem is wonderful. However, potential users of the newly – open-sourced Jaiku Engine (hopefully that's the address where it will live — it 404s at the moment, but I'll watch and update if necessary) will still be dependent upon other Google amenities, namely Google App Engine. Jaiku was ported to App Engine last year, and the code base is now dependent upon being run in that environment. (This could be a ploy to get money, since App Engine charges — or will charge; I'm not sure of the time frame of the fee structure—nominal fees for applications that move beyond moderate-scale deployment — not a bad business move, if I do say so myself.)
Image via WikipediaThe one impending closure that I am really and truly saddened by is the shutdown of uploads to Google Video, which is now (and will shortly be, but for already-uploaded content) solely a meta – video-search site. I've always preferred Google Video to YouTube for a variety of reasons. Some of them are:
- cleaner interface
- more professional player appearance (nice for embedding on sites like swrobotics.com)
- especially the lack of related videos and pop-down search bar
- less cluttered site
- fewer extraneous features
- more focus on videos, less on social networking
(As an aside, there is also some uncertainty how the closure will affect users of Blogger who use the platform's video upload feature, which uses Google Video for hosting. I have never uploaded a video for a post through Blogger, so I'm somewhat detached from this particular concern — but I thought it was relevant nonetheless.)
I have many more reasons and thoughts on this comparison that I can't easily articulate, but I will be very sad to lose the ability to add new content to Google Video. Failing the motivation to deal with YouTube (which has limits on content length and filesize that may or may not be lifted in the aftermath of Video's shutdown), I suppose I might have to start uploading somewhere else entirely, like Vimeo (whose player I like quite a bit).
YouTube has always kind of irked me as a place to upload content. It's a great place to go to watch videos, almost always, but for hosting videos intended for display on another site... Despite the number of sites that do so, its player has always seemed out of place on the sites I'm involved with. The in-built social network (which includes profile pages, a messaging feature, "friendship", and so forth) has always seemed like an unnecessary layer to me.
I suppose I should have seen the writing on the wall when Google's own blogs, which used Google Video uploads themselves for a while even after the YouTube acquisition, all switched over to YouTube videos and left Google Video in the dust. Maybe I'm a video Scrooge, or maybe I'm just being resistant to change (who isn't?). Whatever the reason, I — honest and truly — will miss being able to add my videos to such a simplistically elegant site as Google Video has been.
Update (19:46): Some good news (depending on how you look at it) came this week, too: FeedBurner now shows a link to migrate your account to Google on the My Feeds page. That wasn't there a couple days ago...
Notes:
Microsoft Word’s Grammar Checker
Just in case you haven't noticed, I generally like to hold my writing up to high standards. Perfect spellingg, Ccapitalization, punctuation, etc. are all things I aspire to. (Ending sentences with prepositions is fine by me, though. 
From all those feeds I subscribe to in Google Reader, one of them brought me an amusing screenshot that shows Microsoft Word's grammar checker mid-mistake. I shared that item and it showed up in my FriendFeed, where my mother (who just started using the site) saw and commented on it.
Incidentally, I just started sharing things in Google Reader in addition to starring. Stars will become private again, and I've removed that widget from the sidebar as stuff I really want to share now shows up as part of the FriendFeed item. But back to my main point...
The discussion arising from her one comment, made while I was encouraging her to try out FriendFeed, sparked a total of ten others, not counting the one I made at the end (which was unrelated). The points made basically added up to a general consensus that Word's grammar checker is OK, and it's allowed to mess up.
Computerizing tasks is always hard, and that's why we have human intervention in so many things that could be automated but aren't fully so. That human layer adds the opportunity to catch mistakes made by the algorithms employed by the machine. English grammar (sorry, I'm biased; I've only ever used the English checker) is complicated, even for us humans. Writing algorithms to detect and correct errors is a monumental task, and one which is bound to entail some glitches.
Interestingly, the original question ("Could any of you programmers tell me how you would write an algorithm to determine which form of "coaching" the writer implies?" - msbroida) was never answered, but the discussion was interesting enough.
So can we fault Microsoft Word for making mistakes? No. It's just a program, and programs are only as good as the code that comprises them, which in turn is only as good as the programmer(s) who write(s) it. (Resisting the urge to use regex tricks like /programmers? who writes?/ is hard, but nobody would get it.)
Add the complexity of the English language to the complexity of writing any syntax checker and multiply it times the number of exceptions to the rules of English, and you get a pretty difficult task. What's important is training people to not blindly trust software tools like this, and making sure they don't have a problem with questioning the program if they think it's wrong.
It also couldn't hurt to turn these things off by default, to give people a chance to learn for themselves the difference between "your" and "you're"...
Alert Thingy v1.1: Better, Somewhat
Yesterday, when Alert Thingy for FriendFeed came out at v1.0, there was a lot of buzz in the FriendFeed community (two examples) about all the things that were annoying about the program. The developers listened to the feedback and drew up a list, getting up early this morning to implement the highest-priority requests. It was released not too long ago -- not more than an hour.
First and foremost, the new version can be made opaque. The translucency was very annoying to read sometimes; I personally have twhirl set to be opaque when active, and I would love to have Alert Thingy eventually support going semi-transparent when it doesn't have focus. For now, I'm happy to have it opaque.
Second, comments are now collapsed by default, like the site. It seems that only the three most recent comments are shown, though; the first few are omitted. Since Alert Thingy's purpose is to bring new stuff to light, only showing recent comments works fine. They can be expanded out to the full thread by clicking a link to the right of "Like" and "Comment".
Aside from those, the only other change I've noticed so far is a tweak to the comment tag line. It now appends "...via AlertThingy" instead of "(via Alert Thingy)". I do wonder about the removal of the space; whether or not it was intentional isn't obvious.
If the app is going to be updated daily or (more realistically) weekly for the next several releases, that will make for quick iteration and speedy implementation of requested features.
I actually noticed something new with this version. I'm pretty sure it was a bug in the previous release. Time stamps are in the wrong timezone; I get times five hours ahead of where I'm at now. Alert Thingy must use UTC for everything, rather than reading an offset from the system. It's tolerable; I'm used to UTC times from Wikipedia.
And one more thing, now that I remember. I was playing a full-screen game this morning when Alert Thingy popped up and stole focus. I'm not sure about the status of that in the new version. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Well, that's it for now. I'll bet howard/baines has more coming. I'm probably not anywhere near being done blogging about Alert Thingy.
Update (11:39): Focus-stealing has indeed been fixed. Confirmed a few moments ago using the same game as this morning.
First Look: Alert Thingy for FriendFeed
It's been a couple weeks since I last blogged about FriendFeed. Today is the perfect day to write about it again. This morning, an Adobe AIR client for FriendFeed was launched.
I already use twhirl for my Twitter account, and have for weeks now. I don't want to go back to the website; twhirl is that much better. The new FriendFeed client is refreshing, and a wonderful sidekick to twhirl. I do have a couple things to say about it in the aim of making it better.
Alert Thingy, developed by howard/baines, is locked in a semi-transparent display mode. There are no color or display settings; you're stuck with translucent black. The text is a bit funny-looking, though that's probably an AIR thing. I've seen twhirl users report similar problems.
I first saw rumors of Alert Thingy two weeks ago on FriendFeed, when Bret Taylor (one of FriendFeed's co-founders) posted a link about it, complete with a screenshot. There has been a lot of buzz about it since then, and it finally launched around 12:30 UTC today. There's even a TechCrunch post about it.
But anyway, on to my review. Aside from the aesthetic issues, Alert Thingy displays all the information available on the FriendFeed site, including Likes and comments. One can post comments from the app, which are (at the moment) added along with a small "(via Alert Thingy)" tag line. There's been some discussion about adding a "from" bit a la Twitter, but so far no changes to FriendFeed.
Liking (but sadly not un-Liking) is also available from Alert Thingy. A sound effect plays whenever new items appear or old items bubble back up (due to a comment or Like), accompanied by a notification in the lower right corner of the screen. I can foresee a potential conflict between Alert Thingy and twhirl if both happen to check for and find new items at the same time, but that's an edge case. I won't worry about it, because neither feed is that busy. It would help to know how often Alert Thingy refreshes... There are basically no settings right now.
I do have one major gripe about it, though. FriendFeed's API may or may not return items hidden using the interface on the site — the documentation just says that fetching the main feed returns what would be visible on the site homepage — but Alert Thingy displays everything. For the record, so does twhirl, but somehow it's more noticeable in Alert Thingy. Perhaps I'm just used to the hidden stuff being hidden?
One more thing: All comments are displayed. The site has expandable comments, and I think Alert Thingy would do well to emulate that interface. Displaying all comments on every story seems to overwhelm the window, which I cannot resize at the moment (not sure if it's a bug with Alert Thingy or AIR). And speaking of the comments, it doesn't appear that hyperlinks are hyperlinked yet.
Overall, though, I like this new toy, and I can see it becoming the main way I use FriendFeed in the future. It's just that a couple things have to happen first. Number one, I have to get used to the interface. Number two, Alert Thingy does need to get a few refinements. But how could I expect a perfect app two hours after release?
Update (15:00): I'm not the only one who's expressed some concerns about Alert Thingy. Steven Hodson posted about the opacity and text size issues on FriendFeed Watch, and there's been a steady stream of comments coming in to the major FriendFeed items themselves.
Update (04/14): Updated to v1.1, with fixes to the opacity and comment-verbosity complaints. Moving right along... 
FriendFeed Improves in Leaps and Bounds
Since going public last month, FriendFeed has made numerous advances in functionality and service support. In March alone, there have been six posts on the FriendFeed blog, some containing news of multiple enhancements and/or additions to the service. Here's a run-down of all the improvements FriendFeed's made in just one month.
The first thing to happen was a speeding-up of the service. Bret Taylor posted "FriendFeed is now a lot faster" on March 11, and indeed the site was blazingly fast from then on. It still is. The joke at the time was that a new Ethernet cable sped it up (FriendFeed thread), but the truth is that there was a lot of code tuning, caching, and a new indexing scheme added (FriendFeed thread, changelog entry).
Three days later, feeds for comments and Likes were added. March 14 was the day you could finally "See the stuff your friends commented on and liked". There were also some nice statistics added: Comment and Like totals for both the past week and all time became available in the bar on the right of every user's profile page.
On March 17 (yes, another three-day interval), FriendFeed got search! Not only could you now see your friends' comments and Likes, and not only was the site now blazingly fast, but items previously lost to the ether could now be found again. (I call the addition of search the "Googlification" of FriendFeed, because nearly every Google service has a search box.)
Between the addition of search and the next update, there was a one-week reprieve. It was good to have a rest from FriendFeed update stories because it made the next announcements all the more wonderful. March 24 saw a boatload of updates. First of all, there were five new services added (Disqus, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Seesmic, and SlideShare). Second of all, there were numerous bug fixes. Third of all, FriendFeed got the ability to post back to Twitter! Commenting on a tweet in your feed gave you the option to also send the comment as an @reply via Twitter.
As if all that wasn't enough, the FriendFeed team launched their API the following day, on March 25. Since the launch, third-party developers have released a WordPress plugin (which can be seen in action on CodingExperiments.com) and a statistics site, with an Adobe AIR application rumored to be on its way.
So, in short, FriendFeed is making humongous strides in advancing its service. They sure turn around features a lot faster than Google... Here's to another month of FriendFeed advancement!
Oh yeah, it can't hurt to plug my FriendFeed page while I'm talking about the site, can it?
FriendFeed Officially Launches
After five months in private beta, FriendFeed has now opened its doors and enabled simple, immediate registration for anyone who desires to join the community. FriendFeed, which provides a stream of friends' activities aggregated from a pool of nearly 30 services (as of this writing), also raised $5,000,000 in funding through two of its co-founders.
The changes have been coming thick and fast at FriendFeed, and I anticipate that they'll just keep on coming in the future. Since they got Kevin Fox working on the UI, things have been getting better and better. Why just a few days ago, they added tabs to the interface, and it's always been quite user-friendly and easy-to-use. I have had an account for a few months now, and I like the service. Perhaps now that it's public, more people I know will sign up for it... Or not. Let's face it: Most of my friends are pretty non-technical. But I'll just see how it goes. Meanwhile, enjoy the open registration, everyone!
Xoogler Kevin Fox’s Destination Revealed
When all the Google blogs (notably Google Blogoscoped and Google Operating System) picked up on the departure of Kevin Fox from Google, all that was known was that he was leaving to join a start-up (the only information he left in his blog entry). Now we know where he's going. The start-up is FriendFeed, whose widget can currently be seen in the sidebar of this very blog (you might have to scroll down a bit, er, a lot). Kevin Fox designed the interfaces for Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader's current interface, and now is heading to FriendFeed HQ to join fellow Xoogler (short for Ex-Googler) and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit, who was the creator and lead developer of Gmail.
FriendFeed's blog entry, posted by Paul Buchheit himself, talks about the challenges and lost versions of Gmail that Google developed years before it even let out a peep to the public, and how Kevin took all the not-quite-meshing features, functions, and interface components and fused them all into a great interface. The hope is that Kevin will be able to apply his extraordinary talent for interface design to FriendFeed, which is planning lots of new functionality (or at least, that's the implication). I hope to see his work as well; it's just so darn good! Best wishes, Kevin!
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