A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

Today news broke that a new alliance to share location across multiple services appeared on the various tech sites. Of course within the techcrowd, anything “open” is cool: open source, openid, etc so I guess open location must be the next cool thing. Most who know me well, know that I’m betting a lot on the capability and consumer uptake of LBS as a whole, so one would naturally think, I’d be loving this Open Sharing of Location Based Objects Alliance business. But I’m underwhelmed here.

The thing is Location Based Services (which I’m broadly including location based social networks within) are so bleeding edge that I’m not convinced that a consortium of startups (with the exception of powerhouse wayn) is going to lead to much. I mean I have to applaud for Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN for all playing nicely in the sandbox. But heck these guys don’t even have a website for the initiative yet so maybe the announcement was premature. Or maybe it was just a crafty way for the startups to get some publicity.

If Google (with Latitude) or Yahoo (with Fireeagle) get involved things may change and certainly in the future as we see more divergent uses of location, then an alliance of sharing data makes sense. But for the shortterm most users will apply location awareness in a similar way and are not likely to take the need/data across multiple (similar/competitive) LBS companies.

I’m all for open, and in the longrun this same play could get interesting, but at present, well, nothing to see here…move along.

Source
directionsmag Techcrunch VentureBeat

So everyone is talking about the new Safari 4 beta that was released today; another jab in the reignited browser wars. Which from a consumer standpoint is great because with 4 major browsers out (no I’m not looking at you Opera) we are starting to see some diversity in choice, features, and performance.  From a developers perspective additional browser interest is both a blessing and a curse.  It moves the technology forward in a competitive manner, which for those of us who view the Internet as a “platform”, that is a good thing.  It also mostly is moving standards forward, which again is good.  On the other-hand it greatly adds to our development time.  In fact, I once watched a presentation with one of the leads for Google maps that said  at least half of their dev time is spent on browser compatibility - ouch! And our experience isn’t much different.  So that sort of thing definitely adds up to loss of productivity.  It is what is though, and since Safari is the hot topic of the browser fight for the moment, I thought I’d look in a little more depth at the release beyond the typical technews PR rehash.

Consumer Features: Coverflow & Top Hits + (bugs?)

The flashy consumer features are really about safari’s new UI.  It has a more streamlined interface: the “tabs on top” management I find slightly uglier but far better in terms of usability.  The UI element Coverflow, which most are familiar with either directly through MAC OS or via iTunes and the iPhone, is now implemented directly when viewing your history and bookmarks.  Using it for a few hours I found it works quite fast but I’m underwhelmed.  What would have been really cool is if they would have implemented a quick native rendering version of search using coverflow.  The infinitely cool startup company searchme does this, though I find it a bit slow and memory intensive since its done via web programming.  If apple would buy out searchme and actually implement the thing natively within safari, now that would be cool.

Top Hits feature is also really cool, and I like that it opens by default in a new tab, which for one thing looks nicer then opening a blank page and actually seems quite useful in general.  The only downside is you cant seem to add directly to that page, it really is your most frequently used pages, and I would have liked to had a way to manually override it.

The final UI element is less feature and more bug which is just the occasional incompatibility issues with sites.  I’m currently writing this with the Wordpress editor (which is actually ‘codewise’ tinymce editor) and when I went to insert a link, the normal modal lightwindow view that should pop up just freezes and blocks your ability to do anything after that.  This sort of thing happens with some JS rich sites and its been a show stopper with me using previous versions of safari (couldn’t use google docs for quite some time because it wasn’t “safari compatible”).  In today’s wordpress example I was able to recover my locked window by using the dev tools (more on that in a minute) but still that would normally be a fail for a typical user.  In fact I think Apple needs to work on some sort of compatibility mode so normal users don’t have these sorts of problems.  If those were resolved I do think Safari could pickup even more steam.

Performance testing Safaris new Nitro Engine

Safari 4 Nitroengine performance

So one of the biggest things Safari 3 boasted and now even more so with Safari 4 is that its the fastest browser.  Since fastest seems to be always subjective from a marketing side, I figured I’d actually run it through some real world analysis.  I compared Safari 4 against Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Google Chrome.  To keep the test fair I ran all browsers using the same machine (a dual core 2.2ghz imac with 1Gb ram) running the same OS( windows xp “native” via bootcamp).  I did two tests that measured real world  load speed with caching turned off.  For a basic test I loaded the socialguides blog up in all 4 browsers.  The socialguides blog is a fairly plain vanilla wordpress install with very little JS or other stuff so loading is fairly quick.  I then compared that with socialguides web service that we are currently building which is very JS/AJAX rich to get a feel for the javascript rending and its speed in handling webapps in general.  You can see the graphed results above (load times measured in seconds).  While these tests are far from exhaustive and I’m sure someone like arstechnica will do some real hardcore testing, my own cursory testing seems to indicate that safari is in fact the fastest browser - even beating out Google Chrome.  And well i n my eyes, that alone makes it a winner.

Safari Developer Tools

As a developer if there was one reason I use Firefox as my daily browser, I’d attribute it to my beloved Firebug.  For those of you unfamiliar with Gods gift to web programmers - Firebug, basically lets you edit a website on the fly: you can mess with css styles, edit html, walk the dom tree, debug javascript, and a whole lot more.  There’s an Internet Explorer add on called the IE developer toolbar that is sort of like it, but the IE toolbar is so abysmal comparatively, I shudder to even mention it in in the same sentence as Firebug.  And as for safari…well it didn’t have much.  Because of this, most webdevs I know will do most of their front development on FF first then painfully deal with incompatibilities with IE and safari after the bulk of the debugging has been done on FF.

Now with Safari 4 Apple has been kind enough to include a set of developer tools that seem very much to echo Firebugs functionality.  While it will take some time to really get an accurate impression, the few hours of using it I already like it far more then IEs dev toolbar and almost as much as Firebug.  In fact there are a number of features that I find superior.   I like that it has its own menu which the lack of is a major annoyance with Firebug and the IE toolbar.  I like that you can change the User Agent directly which requires either a different plugin on an annoying “about” hack with FF.  I also really love the network timeline as it helps track down javascript timing problems.  Also the ability to disable images, css, cache, javascript is really useful (though disabling site specific hacks is weird on multiple levels).  And finally the web elements inspector is quite good and almost to par with firebug.  The only thing I heavily dislike about it is that it seems not be able to insert completely new css “test” styles via the rightside pane on the fly, which I use in firebug all the time (though it could be there and i just haven’t found it yet).

Conclusion

Overall between the quickness of speed, the coolness of coverflow and tophits, and the impressiveness of the developer tools, I may be switching over for the first time using safari as my main browser, time will tell, but right now it definitely is in contention.

(one of the original “offending” images)

So for those of you who werent aware, Google got sued in May 2007 for its super cool streetview project. Of course like any dominate company Google gets sued all the time, though I found this one a bit interesting as it touches on privacy issues in an always on, location aware web world.  As the Internet is in a major evolutionary step as we speak - moving from a sort of virtual world, to one that augments the real world - more and more real world privacy issues will come up.

In this case a couple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania wanted $25,000 from Google because of the “mental suffering involved” when Google indexed pictures of their home (which is located on a private road), and made them available on Google maps and other apps for all to see (obviously without the couple’s permission).  While I personally think the whole “I want 25k for mental suffering” bit is crazy, I also am sensitive to the fact that not everyone is comfortable with total physical transparency in the completely public virtual web world. And in that sense Google’s response to the claim that with “satellite technology complete privacy no longer exists” is a very non reassuring answer for a “do no evil” company (even the answer  is true, legally speaking).

At any rate it seems there was little surprise in the case (even if it did drag on for awhile) as most legal tech experts figured it would get thrown out, and that’s exactly what the judge did.  While, the legality of it is no longer in question it still remains to be seen how much we the consumers are willing to give up our own privacy for the sake of exciting technological advances.

I personally have mixed feelings.  How about you?

Sources: cnet newtechnologydirectory ericgoldman corank

So you may wonder when you see all of those TinyUrl version of links to your site on Twitter if those links actually positively affect your sites page ranking.  If so read on…

The quick answer is mostly no… and the long answer is of course more technically complicated.  First lets delve into TinyUrl.  In case you dont know what TinyUrl is basically it can take any URL and turn it into a shortened “tinyurl” - perfect for microblogging sites like Twitter where you only have 140 ish characters to get what you have to say across and you dont want long urls waisting those preshish 140 characters.

Now the TinyUrls service at the technical end generally does things right.  For example a link to socialguides gets converted to http://tinyurl.com/clpr7g.  And what is happening behind the scene is that when you click on that link it takes your browser instantaneously (so you never know) to the TinyUrl server and they lookup what that URL actually responds to and the forward you off to the real URL before you ever knew your browser went anywhere.

What’s important (from an SEO perspective) about the redirect from TinyUrl is that they do it via a 301 header redirect which tells your browser (in a standard compliant way) that the actually URL has “permanently moved” to the real address.  This is incredibly key as Google passes the pagerank for the original tinyurl not over to tinyurl.com but to socialguides.com, or well whatever the final site is supposed to be. That’s a good thing.

Unfortunately its not all rosey in the land of TinyUrl and Twitter services.  First, because of the nature of tinyurl shortening the link you no longer have anchor tags.  For example if you make a link like this: Techzulu a cool technology blog covering southern california , Google will assoicate the link reference to the Techzulu site with potentially important keywords like “technology blog” and “southern california”.  Now if we look at the TinyUrl version: http://tinyurl.com/ack7de we see that there are no anchor tags and thus less SEO loven.

Now if that wasnt bad enough, when it comes to Twitter the thing I said about the 3o1 redirect that TinyUrl does that allows you to get the “link juice” actually doesn’t even count.  The reason is Twitter takes all URLs found in posts and appends a “nofollow” to each link.  This means that Google will not follow the link at all and thus gives you no credit for said link. This, much like wikipedias implementation, is primarily to avoid spam from blackhat seo folks and the like.

On onehand this really isnt a TinyUrl problem at all so why do I bring it up?  Only because if your link is fully written out on Twitter (in long form) at least you get a little bit of that silly marketers thing called “brand awareness” for your site even if you dont get Google credit for it.  If TinyUrl is used, not only do you not get Google credit for it, you also dont get any brand loven either.

Unfortunately while I understand the Google spam issue, and the reason for nofollow on Twitter it is unfortunate that Google has asked Twitter to implement it that way.  If people are talking about a website then surely that is precisely what Googles pagerank SHOULD be counting to determine popularity/authority/etc.  But that rant is probably for a different post.

So all that said, should TinyUrl still be used?  Probably, because you likely still need to shorten URLs on microblogs and you get what you get.  As for us, we’ll be partnering with a with a very cool company that is still in stealth mode (and arent we all ) in the future that could help resolve some of these shortcomings. Stay tuned.

Sources: beussery web1marketing andybeard

So the mobile app market has been picking up steam for some time since the success of the iPhone.  While most aren’t doing anything innovative, generally speaking centralized app stores are good thing for both developers and consumers alike

With the Mobile World Congress event going on we are getting lots of announcements and date clarifications on all those non apple app stores.  Here is what we got:

• Paid Android Store is finally going live.  Looks like Google is finally taking submissions for paid apps and they could be available as early as next week. Frankly its about time since the store wasn’t that compelling to developers until a paid model existed.
• Nokia is launching their own store.  Called the Ovi, its due out this may ….it looks to be pretty bleh at this point.
• Blackberry is coming out with there application center.  While its been announced since fall and RIM has been taking developer applications for the storefront since a few weeks ago, as far as I know, there hasnt been an actual target date besides “spring”.  It could be compelling with so many blackberry users, we’ll see though.
• The new Palms Pre also will have an app catalog.  The Pre is one sexy little device and could be the dark horse in the smart phone war, and at the very least it should help revive a very much dieing company called Palm.  So I’m keeping an eye on how the WebOS develops.  There is a palm developer site and an official palm development network blog that has some info which, as of today, has some brief info about oreily publishing ch1 of javascript development for webapps on the platform, but it aint much to go on.  As far as I know there isnt even an official launch date yet, only some rumors swirling around a march timeframe.  So until then we’ll have to see how things progress.

I think thats all of the current batch of app stores announced that I know of, if anyone else knows of any, leave a comment.

So I was doing a google search for some documentation on some random header names within the iPhone development kit (stuff about the UIScrollview for whatever worth) and I found google had indexed the entire ebook version of the O’reilly iPhone SDK application Development book.

Now first off this book seems awesome and as one of the devs building apps right when the appstore was released - I probably would have payed my left arm for a hardcopy of a book like this to help get us through some of that initial blind stumbling.  So that said, I’m not sure why the whole thing has been posted  and indexed in google for free.  Mabye its a mistake or some hack copyright violation, or maybe its legit - I dont know as the site that seems to host it seems to be a japanese iPhone developer.  So if anybody believes it is actually just some freeloading copyright violation, let me know in the comments and you’ll have my sincere apology and the link (which BTW is NOT hosted here, I just found it through google) will be taken down immediately.

But until then…get it HERE.

I’ve got to admit, wordpress is pretty epic as blog systems go.  They have a hosted service which is free, or you can pay for an upgrade to get premium features.  While I’ve always admired the wordpress guys from a far, I’ve always used blogger.  The reason has been pretty simple: I’ve always wanted/needed to use my own custom blog domain.  To have a hosted blog as blog.company.com or whatever.com (instead of with the wordpress domain) required the premium upgrade.  Now not that the insanely trivial 10 dollars a year or whatever it is for the wordpress upgrade isnt worth it, but just the fact that blogger offers that feature for free always just made me use blogger.

But this go around we are trying to be SEO focused from the get go.  And on that point blog.company.com doesnt hold as much juice for the overall domain strategy as company.com/blog does. To avoid mickey mousing stuff (like using a silly masking type strategy - which BTW losing some of the SEO advantage you were going for in the first place) the best thing is just to start hosting the blog on your own webserver.  I’ve usually avoided that for various reasons (such as why waist your own webservers resources when you don’t have to), but it was starting to look like time to break down and install the opensource version of wordpress.

As code goes, wordpress base is actually quite nice, and since we are (among other things) a LAMP house, integration is a snap. What’s particularly nice about the integration with your own system is that you can start utilizing blog feeds on other parts of your site with much less overhead.  For example, a good SEO strategy would be to put some of the most recent blog posts on the footer or sidebar of your “nonblog” pages, as it adds a we-bit of dynamic content (useful for both the nartural user flow of your site as well as SEO gains).

Now one way to do this if your site was hosted directly with wordpress or blogger would be to just get something like a feedburner widget which can be a plug in play type solution for your main site with minimal effort.  Of course you don’t want to do that because feed widgets like that bring in the posts via javascript and thus dont get seen at all to our google crawler friends.  So no SEO value there.  This leaves us with the sort of “standard” route that a lot of folks like myself have used (if they are LAMP based that is), is to rely on the MagpieRSS library.  Now the Magpie solution is cool in that you dont have to write your own xml parser but it tends to lack some flexibilty.  Even more importantly is that to use it effectively so you dont crush your server (by having every user request to your servers also have to fetch data from another server ) you need to implement a caching algorithm.  Now of course, writing code to cache in PHP is pretty simple but then you lose some of that dynamic SEO loven that we are looking for.

So that leaves us with a local wordpress install.  Integration becomes a snap, since they are just local lookups there is the lowest performance overhead and maximum SEO value.  Now already brought up the downside, which is that I dont get the offload advantage of “freely” using someone else hosting.  But heh, no matter, noone reads this blog anyways…

Since we  will be migrating domains in the coming future, today we setup a little virtual host loven in Apache.  While most folks know the importance of setting up proper canonical structures with 301 redirects and the like for SEO purposes, I figure I’ll post just in case someone doesn’t.

First a basic virtual host setup:

Now that gets us going for adding another domain on the same apache server.  You can add as many of these virtualhosts blocks as you need domains supported.

Okay so next is to get a little SEO in play.  One of the most talked about things on the seo side is getting the canonical structure of your website setup properly so the www and non www dont end up being seen as two different sites to google and the like.  The downside is obvious if www.socialguides.com and socialguides.com are treated separately then your pagerank could be split between.

While it doesn’t matter which version you pick, you do need to pick one and roll with it.  Now a mistake that gets made occasionally is people just aliasing one to the other.  Something like using Apache’s ServerAlias directive to take all requests that dont match your preferred “www.socialguides.com” and show it anyways.  The problem though is while a user then doesn’t get a dreaded 404 error, you’ve only really just masked things and our search engine friends like GoogleBot will still think they are separate.  Instead you want to send with it a 301 permanent redirect in the header so the crawlers know to unify the link juice.

With that we need to add another virtual host entry with a redirectmatch rule.

The reason we add a completely new entry all together is that it fixes some annoying bugs with infinate redirect loops as well as gives you the ability to catch the “bad requests” in separate logs if so desired.  If your not using a virtualhost directive then all you really need is the redirectmatch.

Anyways as you can see we can now catch non-www traffic (as well as typos) in a SEO friendly type of way.

hello, hallo, konnichiwa, hola, sholem aleykhem, salamalekum, buon giorno, namaste, ma nishma, bon jour, nazdar, aloha, ahlan wa sahlan, bore da, guten tag, ni hao, etc etc…

So we are building something.  I guess we are always building something.  But the thing is we’ve already built this one thing and now we’ve begun building this massively cooler other thing thats in someways the same and other ways totally different.  For the past few months we’ve just been in the cave building it.  But now it’s gotten far enough along that we can pull our heads up and blog a little here and there.

I give you fair warning, this blog is likely to be pretty random.  Developer tech nerd stuff with some random business commentary and who knows what else.  It will probably become a little more focused as we come towards launch and start talking about company and product type stuff but for now, well, whatever.