Over the past several days when using Facebook I have seen all kinds of strange errors. I would switch browsers, refresh cache, and even attempt to log out and back in. All produced a myriad of errors. Here is the latest error I received while attempting to “Like” something:
What's a database???
The really bad thing is Facebook is mostly used by very non technical people, “What is a database?”. With Google+ gaining ground, it is not the time for FB to be unstable.
I knew one of the few people who read this blog would respond. This response was from Ryan Baxter (the lead developer in Lotus integrating Open Social into the next version of Lotus Notes) on Twitter:
From Google+ JS: var Q=j.gadgets||{},Ib=j.shindig||{},R=j.osapi||{},google=j.google||{}; Answer your question?
#OpenSocial
I did not get into the first wave of Google+ so I wasn’t even able to get at the source but it looks like Ryan did, but, the time I spent on his team gives me some good insight into what this block of code Ryan sent me means. The j.shindig, j.gadgets, and j.osapi are the key pieces in the line of code. Once again, I don’t have the implementation of these classes but these are exactly the packages my previous team had been working with. Most of the container services function we provided is in the gadgets namespace. OSAPI is most likely Googles implementation of the Container specification. This certainly provides a favorable answer to my previous question but it does not totally confirm Google is off doing their own thing or staying on track with the public specification. (I am sure that comment will generate some feedback).
If it does, you can’t find any reference to Open Social on their Google+ site. More interesting, this quote from an article on IBTimes somewhat mentions this:
Open Social, launched in 2007 with the aim to create an open standard for social network applications, faded away as Facebook monopolized the spotlight. 2009 saw Google’s struggles in the social-based communications system Wave and Buzz, both stirred the market but did not survive.
Given that Google+ does implement many of the promised features of what Open Social was supposed to offer, I think it will be interesting once we learn if Open Social is part of Google+. We do know that Facebook continues to shun the initiative and remains disconnected as they bank their own proprietary model against the collaborative efforts in Open Social. Only time will tell…
This is an interesting concept and the first thing I thought of is advertisers paying people to tag their products in pictures. This would be similar to a publishing fee for blogs and sites that use things like Google Ads or Adbrite.
Could the casual Facebook user be making money in the future???
Podio is a new cloud based business tool, it is sort of the Facebook for business. It is also clearly a direct competitor to SalesForce.com and LotusLive in my opinion. It looks like it has a really nice set of applications right out of the gate and they are tailored for running a business. It has things like email, calendar, meetings, project planning, crm, and all kinds of tools for different industries.
I find it amazing as more and more areas in the world are using Twitter to drive something. My latest observations have been around Jeff Probst and the American show “Survivor”. You can follow Jeff on Twitter and Facebook and you can also go to his blog. If you are in the technical world, this is really not anything new. What you can see is how Jeff promotes his brand (namely himself) and his product (the show Survivor) on as many social sites as possible. Jeff is spending a lot of time on his blog, facebook, and twitter. I find him writing snippets here and there and many posts on his blog that make the show that much more interesting. I have been a long time Survivor fan since day ne and the value these social tools adds is incredible. It is like you get to connect with the real deal and not just show up on Wednesday nights to be entertained for an hour. This is exactly how a business or brand can take advantage of social software and use it to drive interest and ultimately sales. I also noticed he uses Google Ads on his site – I wonder how much he makes from them…
So I have dove into the whole social network stuff pretty heavily, like most anyone related to technology. I now find myself following many people on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The information for the most part is interesting at best but to be honest about it, most of the information simple stinks. The “rivers” of information are just that, uncontrollable rivers that have no structure or guidance. Someone you follow posts great stuff then all of the sudden has a flurry of useless posts and information, only making the river harder to navigate. When you wake up in the morning and there are over 200 tweets or 300 plus new facebook events that is pretty hard to consume and navigate.
So yes, there are filters, search tags, and a couple of other ways to limit the feed but the reality is the information is inconsistent and not reliable. Twitter is even more of a nightmare to follow for long conversations between people. I spend most of my time in Facebook deleting messages and stop following posts by people or applications than actually reading anything fun, funny or business related.
Then you throw in LinkedIn. I am actually beginning to favor LinkedIn over all of the rest because of one simple element – the professional groups. I can easily navigate to a group and see “what’s going on” in that particular space. Almost like a news section of a newspaper. I also enjoy seeing the job changes, profile updates, etc of the people I follow because usually that information is interesting.
Lastly, there is PlanetLotus and PlanetEclipse. I think there is something here with controlled aggregations. I can go to a centralized place to read things related to a given product or technology or at least be guaranteed the content is somewhat related to the community.
So yes, this is a rant as I sit here tonight and find these social networks more frustrating than useful. Maybe I will feel different tomorrow when I wake up and see 800 things I have to ignore.
I was looking at some Facebook source today and I noticed the JavaScript code referencing something called BigPipe. My curiosity lead me to Googling “BigPipe” and I ended up learning a very interesting technique for web site optimization. What is BigPipe?
This is similar to the pipelining performed by most modern microprocessors: multiple instructions are pipelined through different execution units of the processor to achieve the best performance. – link
Facebook does a great job outlining their use of BigPipe and I even found the opensource project on github – check it out here. Check out some of their performance results using a traditional approach versus pipelining the content:
As most know, Facebook is mostly written in PHP. The open source project on gitHub has sample implementations also in PHP so it is very easy to follow.
Earlier today, passed on by Mikkel on Twitter is an excellent article on OAuth. Mikkel has created an abstracted view part for use in his TwitNotes that does the OAuth work for you. As Mikkel outlines, he has gone through the same struggles as Ryan did in his article on Ars. Even though the article has some great visual graphics, don’t think its not comprehensive. The article goes deeply into the problem at hand and even offers some suggestions how Twitter could change its OAuth flow like LinkedIn and Google.
Even in the context of server-to-server authentication, OAuth should be viewed as a necessary evil rather than a good idea. It should be approached with extreme trepidation and the high level of caution that is warranted by such a convoluted and incomplete standard. Careless adoption can lead to serious problems, like the issues caused by Twitter’s extremely poor implementation.
Reading the many posts about the white paper about XPages and Domino I went ahead and read the link in Ed’s post about the case study CRM application built with Domino XPages. After reading the article, which I found pretty interesting, I noticed there were no “share” or “tweet” icons anywhere to be seen on the IBM.com site. Maybe this is just a point in time statement, however it is certainly an opportunity for things like the new Vulcan objectives – maybe IBM.com should be a target to be Vulcanized…
I am sure this post will get some attention but to put it simply, I would have tweeted this if the icon was there! Ok, I will copy and paste the URL for now…