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Out of beta, releasing on time
July 7th, 2009

I think this says it all:

Others say that, over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of “beta” is debatable. And rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely.

The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launches-back-to-beta.html

Tags: Beta, Google

Real peer-to-peer
June 16th, 2009

Continuing a theme that’s being going on this blog, the engineers at Opera have apparently been thinking along similar lines to social networking as I’ve outlined here. As Betanews reports, Opera Unite is a piece of software that presumable will be included in the Opera browser that allows users to share files, sticky-notes, and any other imaginable peer-to-peer application sans any third parties. (In principle, this is correct; however, the unfortunate proliferation of NATs and dumb firewalls makes proxies necessary, which are convieniently provided by Opera.) The truly innovative and exciting part of this technology is that for the first time in the Web 2.0 era, users (not to mention developers!) can have control over “the cloud.” As Lawrence Eng explains at the Opera Labs blog:

Social networking is important, but who owns it — the online real estate and all the content we share on it? How much control over our words, photos, and identities are we giving up by using someone else’s site for our personal information? How dependent have we become? I imagine that many of us would lose most of our personal contacts if our favorite Web mail services shut down without warning. Also, many of us maintain extensive friend networks on sites like MySpace and Facebook, and are, therefore, subject to their corporate decisions via “Terms of Service” and click-through agreements. Furthermore, what does it mean anyway to be connected to hundreds of our “closest” friends? What about our real social networks, the people we want to interact with on a regular basis (like once a week, or even every day)? Why are online solutions to help us with our real-world social needs so few and far between?

UIs, comments, and social networking
May 21st, 2009

While writing my last post, I was thinking about how to convert this blog into a ZUI.  However, the technology is still evolving and I’ve found it difficult to adjust to using ZUIs (such as this fantastic web-based one I found after writing yesterday’s post) because the flow that zooming enables is broken by the presence of other windows and having to click on links that take me out of the ZUI.

Then I realized was that what I really wanted was to eliminate the separation between the “authoring mode” and the “viewing mode” of my website.  For example, I’m typing this in a completely separate user interface than the one I use to view this blog—which shouldn’t be necessary.  There is a similar issue for visitors when commenting on blogs.  I’ve tended to think that comments are a sort of hack that isn’t really integrated into the rest of a blog.  (I’ve also tended to think that blogs themselves are sort of a hack, but that requires a separate explanation.) So I propose inline comments.  This idea obviously comes from the ZUI overlay mentioned in the previous post, but the crucial difference is that I propose allowing visitors to create them, to be displayed, like blog comments, for everyone to see.  Imagine little speech bubbles proliferating on blogs:
Example of an inline comment

Example of an inline comment

This could quickly become unwieldy, however.  The point is to enable comments to appear alongside the post (and, if referring to a specific sentence, next to that sentence), and thereby more integrated and less hack-ish.  But a comment is also most relevant (usually) to the person who wrote it and may be marginally interesting to his or her friends (this applies mostly to Twitter, but Facebook and YouTube aren’t far behind).  The comments with more lasting value could be moderated up to visibility for everyone, while the more ephemeral comments (still serving an important function to someone) could be visible to the commenter’s friends, thanks to the Facebook API and similar magic, but still displayed inline with the rest of the content on the page.

I’ll try to implement this myself for this blog, but if anyone else is going to do so (or if this already exists), please comment.

The Once and Future Humane Interface
May 20th, 2009

Jef Raskin’s idea for a “humane interface” may come to fruition on the web in the near future. Since the Archy project stopped development several years ago, some of its developers focused on implementing a less ambitious project (Enso), implementing only a small portion of the “humanized” user experience.

At least one new project aims at implementing Raskin’s most ambitious idea—a zoomable user interface—in the browser. One of these is OpenZoom, an open source project aimed at creating a set of Adobe Flex components that can be dropped into a Flash container for an instant ZUI. Currently, however, the technology is pretty much limited to multiscale images. (But the graphics overlay component gives a promise of exciting things [demo] to come!) If ZUIs became common on the web, it would be a major step toward a “zoomworld”—Raskin’s vision of all computer-human interaction happening through a ZUI.

Now if only this were implemented in JavaScript, whole websites could be made into ZUIs without reimplementing their AJAX coding!

Tags: Flash, Flex, ui, ZUI

Email CAPTCHAs, or why email is broken
May 19th, 2009

What if answering a CAPTCHA were required to send an email?  (A CAPTCHA is one of those pesky things on web forms that require you to type the text displayed in an intentionally-distorted image in order to make sure that you a human, rather than a bot abusing the website.)

If CAPTCHAs were 100% accurate in distinguishing humans from computers, then spam would pretty much cease to exist.  (It’s possible to harvest CAPTCHA responses from real people by operating a website that “tricks” users into answering a CAPTCHA, but, as mentioned in the above link, they aren’t very effective.)  The researchers behind reCAPTCHA, probably the most popular CAPTCHA program on the Internet with over 400,000 sites using it, appear confident that no computer program can break it, unless the program resorts to randomly guessing words.  Since there are 100,000 words in the reCAPTCHA database, the probability of fooling reCAPTCHA is around 1/100,000.  (Other CAPTCHA systems based on randomly generated characters are not so reliable, with attacks sometimes 90% successful, according to the reCAPTCHA paper.)  Since spam accounts for around 94% of all email, requiring CAPTCHAs to send email would reduce spam to around .000094% of total email (or from 100 billion spams per day to a mere 100,000 spams per day).

There are two problems with this approach.  One is solvable, the other is probably not.  The first is a technical problem: the way computers send email would have to be changed.  But this is not really that hard: in 2007 two researchers published a paper on how to do this (using the SMTP auth mechanism, so it’s not really even a different protocol).  The bandwidth savings would not be equivalent to the volume of spam, due to the increased bandwidth sending a CAPTCHA image (or audio file) for every legitimate email (plus some for failed attempts, but this is only ~5% for reCAPTCHA), but given that bandwidth-lean plain-text email has gone the way of the dodo, this isn’t a real problem either.

The real problem is that commercial (non-spam) email could not be sent.  Mass mailings from political candidates, retailers, or your order confirmation from Amazon.com would not be able to be sent through email.  I think this actually would be a good thing, which I will explain in more detail in another post, but it’s not going to happen unless the Internet is redesigned.  CAPTCHAs could still play a role in sorting inboxes into “human” and “computer” email (there might be some benefit to productivity there), but their value as an anti-spam tool would be demoted from panacea, to, say, a marginally more accurate SPF or DomainKeys.  This could be circumvented with extensive whitelisting (required to some extent already, especially for AOL users), but it would require users to approve senders before receiving email from them without a CAPTCHA, rather than ISPs handling that responsibility primarily.

Such an approval system would be complicated and in all likelihood require more time than managing spam does today, at least in the early stages of adoption (which would, of course, kill it)… unless it doesn’t take advantage of the approval networks which already exist in social networking sites.  The possibilities here are endless, and too much to survey in the remainder of this post (a bad pun which should illustrate that postal metaphors for email are misguided).  The crucial point, however, is that email is broken; it isn’t supposed to be a drop-box for arbitrary bytes but an effective communication system, a role which social networking is rapidly usurping.

Tags: captcha, email, social networking, spam

Google synonyms?
February 18th, 2009

I was quite surprised when my search query “social networking as invitation protocol” was transmogrified to “social networking as invitation etiquette“, not at all the sense I intended.

Google apparently has been adding synonyms to search queries for a few months now.  Google Sets seems to have found a use.  (Though it’s not any more intelligent than it was when I first tried it, judging by this query.)  Unsurprisingly, it’s still in Google Labs (after 7 years).  It will therefore spend an eternity in beta (never releasing on time), but there it has plenty of company.

Google’s confused thesaurus

Chapter 1-2:  Slow Children At Play (pdf)

Draft:

Slow Children At Play – ABC’s (word doc)

From Visitation Clinic (Haiti) – 1/13/10 -  I know you have been following the news.  Our phones and emails haven’t stopped.  I wanted to let you know what I know so far.  The Matthew 25 Guest House in Port-au-Prince survived the quake.  Sister Mary, Vivian and Patrick were up until 2 a.m. treating injured and feeding them pots of soup.  The upstairs porch area of the building collapsed but the downstairs is OK.  Our local coordinator, Bertony Domond and his family are OK. We have not heard from the people at Visitation Clinic as yet.  As soon as we do, I will let you know if there was any damage and to what extent.  Please keep them in your prayers. Fr. Edwige Carre, pastor of Holy Name Church in Nashville said his brother and family are buried in the rubble.  We are very concerned and are hoping for the best. Thank you for your prayers, Fran Rajotte (visitationhospital.org)

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Dancing with the stars is a lot of fun, but dancing of any sort can be fun. Locally, there must be a lot of places to try out something new. I’ve been trying for two weeks now to keep beat to the East Coast Swing. 1,2,3 and 1,2,3 and rock, step…Okay that’s it. Fred and Ginger we ain’t. But not many of the younger gen are familiar with them anyway. Some muscles are tingling because this activity is new. I wonder how they do it on the TV show. There are a good many smiles, guffaws, and belly laughs. That makes it worthwhile.

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Has it really been 10 years since I encountered her at Harpeth Gym? We were watching our kids at practice. For 4 weeks we found ourselves in the same viewing/waiting room at the gym. She at table working and I viewing by the window. Butterflies twittered in the light of her smile and gaze. I met her eyes and she dawned upon me. The dawn of recognizing a friend. I believe the strongest people of our species are brave, and open, and honest…and…

…still here.