Simple Update Protocol (SUP)

Paul Buchheit (the creator and ex-lead developer of Gmail) of FriendFeed has suggested a new format – Simple Update Protocol (SUP) to minimize multiple feed polling.

The idea is simple -

• The feed provider will generate a live or cached feed for ALL recent updates with an ID field to identify the updated entities.
• The feed consumer will poll this SUP feed instead of polling individual RSS feed.
• The feed consumer will request only relevant updated feeds.

HTTP header If-Modified-Since does something similar. But, that would still means requesting for each individual feed.

The proposal looks good for both feed generators and consumers, and not very difficult to implement either. However, the format is too vulnerable to feature creep and standardization can be a painful process.

grep jackass

Quiz: Are You An Online Jackass?

Gmail Updated

Gmail’s new version rolled out for me today, and first thing I noticed that it had reset my gmail chat config (basically I had switched off gmail chat), my greasemonkey scripts were broken and I had a firebug extension warning on top.

While I have no gripe about greasemonkey, resetting gmail chat setting means I’ve to check rest of my settings to be sure anything else is not broken.

New version seems quicker, with additional options in “More Actions” menu and updated “Contacts” section.

Desktop vs Web Apps

The Internet browser is the new OS. What if a “thin client application” becomes thicker than the “Thick”s of the lot. The problem with web applications- “[...]is that they have tried too hard to make the web into a complete application platform, to the point where they don’t even bother holding themselves to the same standards by which desktop application developers are judged.”

Intersting blog- Uncov

From the Beginning to the New Web

This video on journey from the beginning of the web to what we are now calling “web 2.0.”
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Very creative Indeed!

(via Somewhat Frank)

Finding Jim Gray

Fascinating stuff. Amazon has put up a Mechanical Turk task to help find Jim Gray, the Turing Award winner missing since Jan 28, 07 in the sea, by letting people scan and analyze satellite imagery to locate his 40ft (6px-by-2px) yacht.

Wikipedia Has a Web 3.0 Page

Wikipedia entry on Web 3.0 says(at the moment)

Web 3.0 is a term that has been coined to describe the Semantic Web which aims to “organize the world’s information” using a declarative ontological language such as OWL.

Interestingly this entry has survived since 16 Nov’05. I guess this page is destined to be trolled to death.

A Case Against Having Bookmarking Icons On a Site

Not that I was ever able to have bookmarking icons here, as this blog is hosted on wordpress.org with limited customization capabilities. I still want to present a case against having them. This one borrows generously from a comment that I recently encountered. With all due credit to ssp, here it goes after my editing/formatting-

[...]
wouldn’t you agree that having half a dozen ‘witty’ web 2 icons on your site

1. makes it uglier,
2. alienates people who don’t understand half of them,
3. suggests you’re a bit of a web sucker who can’t wait for his 15 seconds of web 2 fame,
4. insults the people viewing your pages by suggesting that
   • they are web 2 suckers as well who would put some ramble up on a bookmarking site and that
   • despite being web 2 suckers they’re too stupid to have a bookmarklet (or other technique) for the one service they actually use handy?

Just asking…

Or just show me the data which show a benefit of having those icons for a page being bookmarked. And, IMNSHO more relevantly, whether this benefit applies to good/helpful pages in the same extent as to meaningless/not-so-helpful pages.

I would never in my life could say it better. But exactly my thoughts. Perhaps there is a reason why Techcrunch doesn’t have them. I would be disappointed if it does.

What I hate about Podcasts/Vlogs

I just wanted to list some general observations from the perspective of a consumer (and not a creator).

• Size: Sample this – a 5 min rocketboom show (a new found thing for me, after all that brouhaha) the file size amounts to ~28mb. That’s just insane. Too much of a hassle. My bandwidth is precious. Why doesn’t everyone use divX/xVid compression along with all other formats just for sake of choice? Or flash maybe. Audio formats are little better placed, but still!
• Linking: I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?
• Transcripts/Summaries: Availability in alternate formats is usually non-existent. Though I understand that each format is unique and all the subtleties and nuances are impossible to incorporate. *rolls eyes* (Watch Jumanji with subtitles )
• Tagging/Commenting: I have been somewhat irregular/occasional subscriber to Geek News Central, TalkCrunch, Morning Coffee Notes and FuzzyBlog over the last year or so, and I use iTunes to manage my podcasts. I can’t tag or comment an episode for later reference and have to depend upon the provided description, which is again – not searchable.

After Digg, Del.icio.us, now Reddit spammed

It seems spammers have found the new avenues. First it was digg, then del.icio.us, and now reddit. And this time they seem to use down-voting bots to suppress legitimate posts and up-vote spam to make it more visible. Innovative eh!

While it doesn’t make much sense to spam del.icio.us for Search Engine Optimization, as its pages don’t get indexed by Search Engine bots

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex" />

digg and reddit both don’t have any such measures AFAIK. As if mail and blog comment spam were not enough of trouble, spamming digg/del.icio.us/reddit is walk in the park – for all practical purposes.

Now, whether ‘Collective Intelligence’ is flawed is a matter of debate. Apparently, whatever is done to facilitate ease of use to the user, equally works for the spammer. There in lies the challenge of user generated content. How insightful!