Does Yahoo signal critical commercial mass for open source?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

 Tim O’Reilly thinks that Yahoo has made a major announcement for open source:

 

‘One of the most important announcements at Oscon last week was Yahoo!’s commitment to support Hadoop. We’ve been writing about Hadoop on radar for a while, so it’s probably not news to you that we think Hadoop is important.[…]Let me unpack the two parts of this news: hadoop as an important open source project, and Yahoo!’s involvement. On the first front, I’ve been arguing for some time that free and open source developers need to pay more attention to Web 2.0.[…]OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor.’

 

Read the whole article here. 

Webshots adds tagging and other features

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Is there really a major difference between users of different photo sites? Probably not, but Flickr’s preponderance in the northern California area where I seem to talk to people about photo sites belies statistics that seem to indicate that Photobucket is more popular in the country, just as Myspace is more popular than Facebook still.

Webshots.com, the photo sharing website owned by CNET [personal disclosure: it’s well known that I’m very close to someone who works there], has introduced a few new features that round out their offering and make it more competitive in the hotly contested online photo site market.

Both sites allow users to give titles and descriptions to the photos they upload, but how they handle them has been different otherwise. Flickr puts all new photos into the user’s “photo stream” and uses (optional) tags to describe photos. Webshots, which has been in the photo sharing business since the late 1990s, has always organized photos into albums. So users could select categories and give keywords for each entire album, but not tag individual photos.

This has now changed and Webshots is allowing users to put tags on each photo. This is a major evolution–they had to take the previous categories, for example, and make them work in the new system. So far it looks like it has worked well and it opens up a lot of new possibilities for user navigation.

Flickr also caught on with the web 2.0 crowd partly because it allows easy access to its API which allows users to build tools and mashups from its photos. Now that it has tags, more interest might be turned toward the API at Webshots, which currently requires special permission to access.

Another feature that really could benefit Webshots is their installation of a system called Gigya that allows users to post an individual photo to a handful of social networking sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, Myspace and Xanga. This kind of feature is essential both for allowing visitors to quickly share interesting photographs and for making the site an multi-faceted part the user’s online experience. Call it web2.0 lock-in or whatever.

While Flickr has recently confirmed that they will have video sometime soon, Webshots already managed to add video capability back in 2006.

One of the interesting facets of Flickr, and something that seems to keep many people coming back, is the popularity of the site as a social networking destination. That is to say, even with rather basic social features, Flickr still offers enough community and content to make a compelling offering to the web 2.0 crowd in the social networking space. It merits saying that Flickr is Yahoo’s most successful entry in the social networking space (sorry GeoCities and Yahoo 360).

Webshots also has some solid social networking features, and it has plenty of comments on popular photos just as Flickr does, but the user base is not as nearly concentrated in the techie demographic, so for example I would say anecdotally that I’ve seen a lot of Flickr accounts that are used as blog photo storage where I’ve only noticed that a handful of times browsing Webshots. But with the Gigya feature, more people may start using Webshots to store their blog pictures. It’s also worth noting that Flickr users are often also using Twitter, last.fm, their WordPress blog, Facebook and other cool sites–so speculatively speaking Webshots may have a bit more of the attention of its users for longer periods at a time.

The same way that many people in the web 2.0 bubble have made Flickr the site of international cool photography for the Internet crowd, many people who are digital photography fans from all the way back in the web 1.0 era continue to visit Webshots and upload their photos. Webshots has more lurkers per uploader on its site than Flickr [that part is just speculation too, by the way]–meaning more viewers per photographer. The layout of the sites is different–Webshots offers a front page with featured photos and then a handful of sections with content specific to each of them: photos selected by editors, with short descriptions and links to the albums, while Flickr offers a front page that displays four new photos by the user, four new photos by that user’s contacts, and four seemingly random photos by others on Flickr, with links to the photos but no descriptions of them by any editors.

So for people who are using a site to upload photos or keep tabs on friends, Webshots or Flickr can both work, depending on the user and what site his or her friends are on already. For the geek crowd, for example those who want to use the site’s photos to build apps, Flickr has established an early lead and has even inspired copycat sites in its own new sub-genre, like Zoomr. But for people dropping by a site looking for some entertaining photos that they can read about, download the full size of, and share easily through email or on social networks, Webshots works well and the tags should make it easier to find stuff.

Review: The Simpsons Movie

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Dan's Simpsons Avatar
It’s hard to believe, but some people don’t actually watch the Simpsons on TV and DVD or whatever, so if you are among that group don’t take my recommendation to see the Simpsons movie. It is filled with references, both concrete and abstract, to characters and incidents and even this review probably presumes a close knowledge of the classic series.

But if you understand this to be, as Lisa once said in an episode about the “Itchy and Scrathy Movie,” “the defining event of our generation,” then you will enjoy the numerous references to all sorts of Simpsons characters and plots of years past, cleverly woven together in a story that may get a bit syrupy and slow at parts [Marge and Homer’s marriage drama is a bit slow..] but offers so many new jokes and clever angles (Martin multiplying his force with a simple wooden board and taking his rage out on the bullies, Bart’s sudden taste for Jack Daniels, the customary stab at Disney, the NSA’s spying program, and other stuff) that it’s definitely worth seeing–and I don’t think I’d seen a movie in a theater for a year before seeing it today.

The satire is just a bit more over the top and visceral in the movie theater–and still the film seemed to have a much closer connection to reality than the show does, in terms of the random themes and characters–over the top socio-political satire and farce, with a much needed reference to Alaska’s reverse income tax from oil drilling funds.

Most of the elements are familiar, with (mercifully) only a rare new character introduced here and there, so the only thing really lacking for me was the close involvement of the Springfield community as key components of the plot–aside from Lenny and his part in setting the crisis in motion with his call to Homer and the obligatory mob scene. Classic old episodes revolved around town’s issues, but that is less true in the later seasons and anyway it might be hard to get the scope needed from a movie with a simple Springfield plot. Most of the story revolves around large-scale events that even involve (still-unconstitutional-for-now) President Schwarzenegger–so in that sense the movie is basically a large-screen, long-form episode fitting more into the later seasons of the show than the earlier ones.

It was quite entertaining–and in my opinion a sequel centering on Mr. Burns would be a good next project.

How dangerous is Hillary Clinton?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Hillary Clinton photo by Reuters, March 2007

Hillary Clinton might be the opponent that many conservatives claim they want to face in the general elections–but that might be true for reasons that are somewhat surprising.

Those clumsy “folks,” as he probably calls them, at the RNC–you know, what remains of the political operation of George W. Bush, that guy whose approoval is less than 30%, that guy who never got any immigration “reform” bill or Social Security Bill or–remember the Orwellian [arghh, so much Orwellian stuff from these clowns–Clear Skies and all that] “ownership society” buzzword from the 2004 campaign? You get the idea. Those people seem to fairly salivate at the idea of Republican candidate taking on Hillary.

But why should anyone listen to the spin from Bush’s people? Bush is finished politically and he was so busy with “war on my mind” that he has practically no major accomplishments to point to. I think there might be some lonely, arid days out at Crawford after the power is gone. (He did get to sign off on quite a few tax cuts though–for his “base” he is actually a great president, and always will be.)

And will Bush ever travel internationally after his term ends (assuming he doesn’t start adding lifetime rule to his other lawless assertions of executive power–Congress has done so little to check him so far, maybe they would accept that as well) when he will probably be indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal?

Is that a bit too far? Well, no. For the great crime–invading Iraq based on falsehoods, the false charges about the WMD, the violation of Iraqi sovereignty–the UN would have to enforce its charter. As it is, the UN seems more interested in legitimizing the brutal, imperial occupation. So for the great crime Bush will likely not be indicted. But for some of the small crimes committed in ICC signatory nations, Bush could easily be held responsible. This would include the CIA “black sites” secret prisons in Poland and Romania (for which I would seriously recommend debate in the European Parliament and the EC for both of their expulsion from the EU superstate, by the way) and the illegal kidnapping of an Islamic cleric in Italy, for which several American agents face trial in absentia in Italy.

So back to Hillary and why the Bush administration types like the idea of running against her. They love the idea of demonizing her the way they and the media did with Howard Dean and Tom Daschle (and by that I mean inflating both of those mediocrities to be leviathons of liberalism). Check out this old Sean Hannity interview with Dick Cheney from June 2005:

‘HANNITY: Not just Howard Dean. I mean, Harry Reid, in front of school children, called the president of the United States of American a loser. Hillary Clinton said there’s never been in the history of this country an administration I believe more intent upon consolidating and abusing power. What is going on in your mind, I mean, as you hear those this? The campaign was over in November.

CHENEY: I sounds to me like…

HANNITY: Seems to be — seems like campaign rhetoric, right?

CHENEY: Well, or beyond it. Maybe Hillary’s spending too much time with Howard.

HANNITY: That’s a good line. And Harry Reid.

[…]’

But as I was saying, the Hillary demonizers are only one group of right-wingers that want to see her run. Another group, the more surprising one, actually wants Hillary to be president because they seem to think that she will be just as much of a warmonger as any Republican candidate, and probably more so. Here’s what Weekly Standard writer and Fox News analyst Fred Barnes said, talking about the Youtube debate this month:

‘FOR HILLARY CLINTON, the presidency is not in the bag. Even winning the Democratic presidential nomination is considerably less than a sure thing. But of the 18 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, Clinton is the most likely to be the next president. And she did nothing last night in the bizarre presidential debate in Charleston, South Carolina, to alter that.

Clinton managed to maintain at least the outward appearance of seriousness in a debate that included a taped question from someone dressed as a snowman, another from a sanctimonious Planned Parenthood official who asked if the candidates had talked to their kids about sex, and an especially silly one about whether the candidates would be willing to be paid the minimum wage as president. Most of them lied and said yes.’

Yes, here we go again with that “serious” thing. (Remember that old Kool Aid commercial?–“Now it’s time to get serious–SERIOUSLY WACKY!!”) And here’s an eerily similar comment from another creep, New Republic writer Michael Crowley:

‘But the one who stood out was Hillary. She shows really impressive poise and confidence, and didn’t lose her stride even in the face of offbeat questions about her gender and voter fatigue with the Clinton and Bush families. I also particularly liked her answer about nuclear power: She explained that nuclear has promise that is hard to tap for reasons of cost and waste–but that instead of writing it off (as John Edwards seemed to) we should redouble technological efforts to address those problems.’

These kind of people supporting Hillary is the one of best reasons yet to support Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton will say anything or do anything to win the Democratic nomination–even friends of the Clintons sometimes let slip occasional truths about their dishonesty–and after that watch out for a Joe Lieberman-style strategy, where she courts the right wing to win the general election.

Will Spock.com, a social listings service, be worth using?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

[Title updated 8/3/2007]

I read about Spock.com on O’Reilly Radar a few months ago, and couldn’t help but be intrigued. Mr. O’Reilly wrote:

‘Michael Arrington wrote the other day about spock, the new people search engine, but I have to say that I don’t think he did it justice. Spock is really cool, and performs a unique function that is well outside the range of capabilities of current search engines. What’s more, it’s got a fabulous interface for harvesting user contribution to improve its results.

You can search for a specific person — but you can do that on Google. More importantly, you can search for a class of person, say politicians, or people associated with a topic — say Ruby on Rails. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it — one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also illustrates the heart of a new development paradigm: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.’

The service is a closed beta, but I finally found a way to check it out–I left my request for it at InviteShare and moments later, I was invited. [Check that service out if you are wondering what new web2.0 stuff is coming down the pike or want to join Spock or Pownce. In fact, InviteShare itself could actually develop into a pretty cool social networking site–at least until everyone in line gets their invite to the red-hot BitTorrent closed beta sites like SuperTorrents, Demonoid.com and Torrentleech.org.]

So I got my invite and went and looked at the Spock.com site, searched a few tags and a few people, and one thing that struck me is how dependent Spock seems on Myspace profiles–useful enough for lots of people but hardly a reliable main source. Also, some sites are based on LinkedIn profiles and entries about famous people rely heavily on Wikipedia.

I think at the end of the day, if nearly everyone joins and tends to their profile (although I don’t know how much control a user has over their own profile because when I was clicking the link to finish the “claim this profile” process it repeatedly gave an error message) it will basically become a social networking aggregator, a hot field at the moment but different than what the site seems intended for.

Why will it not work as a people listing? Basically, because I don’t know how it won’t become a major spam magnet once it opens up to public users. Besides that, it has all the potential to have all the problems that Wikipedia has with user credibility, self-promotion, grudges and personal attacks.

I went in and added my web site, so now people who look at my entry can find that page alongside my less-recently-updated Myspace page. That’s pretty cool. And since you can tag people, I guess I could have tagged myself “MBA” and “Midwesterner” or stuff like that–maybe I will. But then, what’s to stop someone from going to my profile and tagging me “capitalist pig” and “hillbilly” as well? Nothing, it seems. I guess maybe I can vote those down or something–but for now that’s not enough to convince me it will work, or that in the current social networking blizzard I’d really want to spend much time using this particular site.

It’s all kind of unclear how the site will look with heavy traffic, so my observations are quite preliminary. But does Spock match the hype so far? I don’t think so.

Ok another insignificant search engine changes hands

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Here’s a news.com post about the acquisition of the distributed online search engine Grub by Wikia.com:

‘Grub was acquired from LookSmart under the open-source project Wikia. The platform, now available for downloading and testing, is built on users donating their personal computer power. It’s meant to operate through open protocol and community collaborative added functions combined with the wiki.

Last year, Wales claimed that Internet search as we know it is broken. Grub is one of his attempts to gather open-source technologies to organize free content on the Web.’

Well actually I think that Google and Technorati have gotten better rather than worse–and even Live search can be usable.  The only thing really broken about search is that people still use Wikipedia and Yahoo and Ask.

I’d say you’re better off letting your computer help the University of California find aliens than trying to help Jimmy Wales beat Google.  Anyway the first is more likely to happen.

My new app bookmarks, messages and uploads files

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

UPDATE: Flightpath now has its own homepage with links to the latest version at flightpath.sf3am.com.

I’m starting a test run of my new app, Flightpath 0.41. It allows anyone with an API key to create one of three types of tasks–save a bookmark with description, tags and URI link; leave a short message of 140 characters or less; or upload a file. Then all three types of posts go onto the app’s home page as a “public timeline” which shows the last 10. The archives are searchable by number, and posts can be perma-linked.
So even though these can be very different types of information, they all run into the same flow. I don’t know how that will work in practice but that kind of mixed media is popular at the moment anyway with things like tumbleblogs and Twittergrams.
I was inspired by Twitter of course, but I also wanted to build a good file-storing app because I want to be able to send files larger than 10 MB in Pownce. Now I can link to files on my site, of whatever size HTTP and PHP can handle!
It’s in closed alpha now but I want to be making more API keys or a beta version available to more people as the site is improved. I also plan to eventually add a feed.