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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Google Chrome Extensions Go Live

• New Google Chrome Release Adds Support For 1,500+ Extensions, Bookmark Sync (TechCrunch)

Google dropping support for non-modern browsers come March 1st, 2010

• Google Apps Drop IE6 Support (SitePoint)
• Modern browsers for modern applications
  (Official Google Enterprise Blog)

Apple claims iPad will offer the best web browsing experience available

• iPad Features (Apple)
• Apple’s iPad — a broken link? (Adobe)
• The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience? (The Flash Blog)
• Do you really need Flash for the Web? (Kendall Helmstetter Gelner)
• We don’t need Flash on the iPad, we need better tools to build HTML5 sites (dasflash)
• Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? (Daring Fireball)
• Sympathy for the Devil (John Nack)

Host Spotlights:

• Stephan: Sublime Video
• Brad: What Browser?
• Kevin: SitePoint CSS Reference
• Patrick: Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, & Other Stats

Show Transcript

Kevin: February 5th, 2010. Chrome extensions go mainstream. Google drops IE6 and what the iPad means for the future of Flash. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint podcast #47: Checkmate Apple.

And we are all back together again—all four of us! It’s been—I don’t know how many episodes—at least five since we’ve had the whole crew together.

We’ve got Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy network. Hi, Patrick.

Patrick: Hello.

Kevin: Holding down the fort very nicely in my absence. Thank you for that.

Patrick: Thank you.

Kevin: And Brad Williams from WebDev Studios. How’s it going?

Brad: Howdy.

Kevin: You had the week off our last panel show, isn’t that right?

Brad: I think so. That was what … a month ago?

Kevin: I can’t keep track of your travels. You’ve been all over the place.

Brad: It’s all blending together at this point.

Kevin: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas. How is it going, Steven?

Stephan: Pretty good. I’d say “howdy” but Brad took that from me.

All: (laughter)

Patrick: Ohhh boy.

Kevin: Stephan and I are excited about this show, I think it’s safe to say because it’s all about iPad. The entire Web, for the past week, it’s been iPad, iPad, iPad. Apple sure knows how to steal the spotlight. Stephan and I are fans of a lot of things they do.

Stephan, are you ready for some iPad chat today?

Stephan: Yeah, I’m ready to hear what the other guys have to say too.

Kevin: You’ve watched the keynote, I assume.

Stephan: I did.

Kevin: Good. Good.

But before we get to that, there’s a few other stories to check in with. First of all, something we’ve spoken about a few times before was Google Chrome and specifically, extensions support in Google Chrome. This past week, we hear that Google Chrome for Windows has had a major update which adds official support for extensions. It’s been beta only, up until now.

We were a little confused about that the last time we discussed it. I don’t think we’re the only ones; they’ve had a big extensions site up for awhile now but apparently it’s only been available to people running in the beta updates stream but now the official version of Google Chrome for Windows has full support for extensions and also they’ve added bookmark sync in there, which I found surprising. The bookmark management features of the app continue to be under whelming for me but at least I can sync those bookmarks to every other computer I work on.

Stephan: With the bookmark feature, is it— I’m kind of out of loop about this. It seems like a cool feature to me, but as someone who doesn’t really need the syncing, is it something that other browsers are offering right now and how does that compare to the other offerings?

Kevin: It’s been available as an add-on definitely for Firefox. There’s been a few bookmarks syncing extensions as well as things like the Delicious extension that will just replace the browser’s bookmark system with your Delicious account. And certainly Mozilla has been working on just a sort of a general platform for syncing browser related data across all of your computers, not just your bookmarks but also things like history and passwords and cookies and all that sort of stuff.

So it’s a step along the road that other browsers are threading but it’s early in the life of the browser, I think. This is kind of a niche feature. Are there really that many people out there that will be running Google Chrome in more than one place?

Brad: I do. Maybe I’m the minority, I don’t know. Extensions were a long time coming. I think you’re right, Kevin, we did discuss this, I think, about a month ago, that it was announced that extension support was coming to the stable version and then it just never happened. Because I would literally was on the site every day waiting for it to happen and it never did. And there was never really an announcement on what happened but anyways, they delayed it. They finally released 4.0. It’s out and I’m hoping now because even the extension library on the website where you can kind of surf through and see what they have, there isn’t a whole lot in it. So I’m hoping now that it’s in the stable version supports extensions that more developers will get involved and actually create some…

Kevin: Wait, wait, wait, wait—I’m reading the TechCrunch story here and it says there’s 1,500+ extensions available. Are you telling me there’s nothing in there?

Brad: Wait, there might be a 1,000 and some but I’m telling you there’s nothing that really… there’s a couple that caught my eye, but a lot of them don’t really—they don’t interest me and I don’t know if it’s just me but it doesn’t—and maybe it’s because I’m used to specific Firefox add-ons and I haven’t seen those pop up yet.

Kevin: So is it just cluttered with people going, oh, my first extension.

Brad: It’s a lot of that.

Kevin: Displays ‘hello, world’ on browser launch.

Brad: There’s a lot of real basic ones like NFL scores, NBA scores, news from this site, news from that site—stuff that you can get from regular RSS reader anyways. There’s also a lot of Google specific extensions. Quick hooks into Gmail and a Google URL shortener and Google translate integration, a lot of things like that. I’m really waiting for that Firebug extension to show up, so hopefully that’s in the works.

Kevin: The funny thing I just noticed is that the number one most popular Google Chrome extension is Xmarks Bookmarks Sync.

I don’t know if Google is just paying attention to the most popular extension and adding that feature to each release of its browser but yeah, when the most popular extension in your library has just been obsoleted by your latest release, I’m not sure that’s a healthy extensions community.

No doubt the official release of the support will prompt a few more developers to build something a little more meaty. So I’m sure we can look forward to some Firefox-style, really game changing extensions for his browser soon.

Stephan: But it blows my mind that they’re lagging so much in the Mac browser behind what they’re doing on the Windows browser.

Kevin: Well, that’s it; the Linux version of Google Chrome’s extensions are still for the beta release only and the Mac version is only beta right now. Or no, did they release a full version?

Stephan: I haven’t seen a full version, no.

Kevin: In any case, extensions are only available for Mac developers running the developer preview, the super unstable version of the browser. So, yeah, they’re still way behind and they’re asking Mac users to hang tight but I don’t know if the Mac version will always be last in line or if they’re planning to sync them up at some point? I guess we’ll find out.

Well, our next story is also related to Google and they are dropping support for older browsers, including older versions of Chrome, I noticed. Starting March 1st, Internet Explorer 6 users are going to be out of luck because Google is no longer going to be guaranteeing that their web applications will work in older browsers like IE6, anything earlier than Firefox 3, anything earlier than Chrome 4 and anything earlier than Safari 3, which I found was the most generous one.

I’d say anyone running Safari these days would have to be on Safari 4 unless they are running a rather old operating system on their Mac.

They’re saying that starting March 1st, new releases, particularly of the Google Docs and Sites apps will be dropping support for these older browsers and simply won’t be working well, if at all, in non-modern browsers.

I think a lot of us have wanted to do this in our own work. Is Google giving us that permission?

Brad: Yes. I’ve been pretty vocal about it and I’ve actually at our company, we dropped IE6 support a while ago. We’ll certainly do it but there is obviously an additional fee associated with that. But this, I think you made a great point, Kevin; this helps justify…

Kevin: Let me stop you there though. I’m really interested. Is that something—is that an optional extra that your clients tend to take up or do they go, oh, yeah, you’re right, we can probably do without it.

Brad: Most don’t. Most smaller sites don’t take it up. Now, the larger clients—sure, they want it to work on every browser that’s ever been created and they usually will. But we’re very upfront about it. We tell them and we explain the reasoning behind it. But I think like you said. This does help our company and many others out there like it, to justify what we’re doing. It says look, now Google is also taking the same stand that we are. So it’s not just my company trying to take the easy way out and not work on IE6.

It’s just like Google says, a lot of it is because it’s lacking features and you really have to jump through hoops to get IE6 do certain things that you really shouldn’t have to do. I’m sure everybody’s out there cheering when we first saw the blog post, it was a nice moment. And obviously, it’s not just going to stop overnight but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Kevin: Absolutely. I wonder though if corporations are moving to things like Google Docs as their primary office suite. So if they’re dropping things like Microsoft Office and going for the free option where that make sense.

I wonder if that was a way of getting out of paying for an upgrade for Microsoft Office and now staying with Google Docs is going to require them to pay for an upgrade to, well, Microsoft Windows in many cases or at least pay their IT staff to deploy a new version of Internet Explorer. I wonder if their cost-dodging efforts are now going to make them take a second look at Google Apps and go, well, no, that’s not quite as attractive as we were hoping, maybe we’ll go back to Microsoft Office.

Has the strength of Google Docs been at least in the corporate market that you can run it on all the browsers and they don’t have to deploy a software platform upgrade? It’s what I’m wondering.

Brad: Yeah, I’d love to see some numbers on that because I saw couple of articles kind of call that out and it’s hard to say exactly—I mean, you would think it would be a very, very, very small percentage but I’m sure there are people that are using IE6 and Google Docs on a daily basis. I just don’t have any pity for companies really depending on IE6 at this point. I mean, they’ve known years ago that it’s hated among the development community and it’s very hard to work with and they haven’t made the effort to get off of IE6 at this point? I mean it’s 2010.

Stephan: Not to mention security holes you know.

Kevin: Well yeah!

Stephan: I mean, why not jump on that back when we were having all the security issues and update IE6 then? So now it’s becoming more and more apparent; eventually, everybody’s going to start dropping support for IE6 and then they’re going to be really be up the creek without a paddle.

Kevin: Well, you’ve got your web developers telling you to upgrade, you’ve got Microsoft telling you to upgrade, you’ve got now the German government telling you to upgrade, and now Google is telling you— forcing you to upgrade if you want to keep using their software. I think if you’re ignoring the signs now, I think you’re right, I don’t have a lot of pity for them either, Brad.

Brad: I do think it’s funny that you point out that Google says it’ll support Chrome 4.0+.

Kevin: Well, yeah.

Brad: So basically a month and a half after—two months after the 4 came out that that’s the only browser they’re supporting. I think it’s odd.

Kevin: Yeah. I guess they don’t like their older work.

So let’s dive into it guys. Apple last week announced the iPad, its new tablet computer based on the operating system and software platform of the iPhone and the iPod touch, it’s going to run a browser very similar to the Mobile Safari browser that you get on your iPhone except it’s going to be on a big, biggish 10-inch screen, and Apple is claiming right up front—it’s their top selling line on their features page for the iPad—that the iPad will provide the best web browsing experience available. And yet, no Flash support because obviously, Mobile Safari on iPhone and iPod touch has no plug-in support. There just simply isn’t an API for extending that browser and so it’s coming to the iPad with those same restrictions and therefore, no Java plug-in, no Flash plug-in, whatever other esoteric plug-in you might rely on is not going to be there.

Does the iPad provide the ultimate browser experience? That’s my question. Adobe is hoping that people are going to read its marketing saying no, there’s no Flash on this thing. It’s not the best browser experience and therefore people won’t buy it and that will force Apple’s hand to open up its platform to Flash. But is that going to happen?

Patrick: So is this the best way to experience the Web or is it the best way to experience the App Store? It seems like we might have the biggest, most pretty App Store in the land especially Apple App Store but the Flash thing is it’s going to bother people and I don’t think the iPad is going to suffer necessarily but it certainly leaves an opening in the market for someone else, maybe HP with the Windows equivalent, to come in and provide Flash support on a tablet device.

Kevin: I know within six months of the launch of this thing, I will not miss Flash on this device because as we saw with the iPhone, any site that people want to use on that device is going to be updated with HTML 5 video and other— an iPhone specific version of the site where that makes sense. Or if the site does something that is really beyond what you can achieve on that type of browser, they’re going to write their own iPhone app. So I think we’re going to see the same pattern follow the release of the iPad and therefore, for myself, for an early adopter technology-minded user, within six months of the launch of this thing, I’m not going to miss Flash in the web browsing experience.

Stephan, it sounds like you have the same feeling.

Stephan: Yeah. You know, I miss Flash on my iPhone a little bit and it’s just because of the way I use it and what I do. I like to look up restaurants and things and some of those restaurants, actually, a lot of restaurants have Flash-based websites. I don’t know why, and it really annoys me when I’m trying to look at the menu or something and I can’t because the website is in Flash. I don’t think I’ll have that problem with the iPad though just because I don’t think I’m going to use it that way. I’m not going to be looking up restaurants on the go with my iPad. It’s a different user experience, it’s a different methodology of using the iPad than using iPhone and I don’t see the need, I really don’t, and I’ll get to another reason later on the show.

Kevin: Well, that brings up a good point. What is Flash used for? It’s used by hoity-toity restaurant sites. It’s used by movie sites, when you see a movie trailer, the URL at the end is often pointing to an all Flash website. So you’re not going to be able to experience previews to the latest movies on these devices.

Is there anything else people can think of?

Patrick: Video, games, it depends on how you use it I think is how much you’ll miss it but I think that’s a good point. And this is where the point that John Gruber at Daring Fireball made is the companies, the developers, they don’t really care about anybody but themselves and their customers. So they don’t necessarily care about Adobe or Apple but if there’s a sizable audience that’s using the iPad, then they’ll make their sites work well with the iPad. It’s the same as mobile browsing. If it has mobile visitors, a lot of mobile traffic, then they invest in creating a mobile site or have it work well with a mobile device. The same thing will happen here. I think the smaller budget operations are probably the ones that won’t be able to adjust or will be very slow to adjust but as far as the average large game site, large video site, Hulu, etc., I mean I expect that they’ll adjust and get ready to be viewed on the iPad.

Kevin: So here we have a chicken and egg situation where if the iPad is successful and has a big market, the developers will necessarily accommodate them but will the user base come if the experience on day one is not the best? I think what happened with the iPhone was lucky because people were buying it as a phone. And yes, it had a really nice web browser on it but what drew the initial ground swell of user base to that device was the phone. And then web developers wanted to target those phone users with their web apps… great.

On the iPad, what’s going to draw people to that device, if anything, on day one which six months down the line will create a market that web developers want to chase? Is it the apps, is it the bookstore, is it the office suite that you can control with your fingers?

Well, that’s the question. I think Apple is betting that it’s just the coolness factor of Apple’s new device and maybe that is enough. Maybe that’s all it’ll take. I know that’s half the reason I’m buying it.

Patrick: Right. I think that’s a fair point. I think that it’s going to be a good browsing device, something that you’ll check email on browse the web and kind of a lightweight thing for how some people use a laptop even. You know lighter laptop users might find it as an acceptable substitute, something that’ll be lighter and easier to carry and you know the coolness of Apple is certainly a big part of it and I don’t foresee it having any problems because of the Flash thing. Does that does not mean people won’t buy it I think on day one? Well, I mean, I see plenty of people commenting that they’re going to wait for the second generation and I think there’s a lot of people that’ll feel that way not because of the Flash issue even but just because of the perception that first generation devices and you have some kinks that need to be worked out whether it’d be Apple or someone else.

I think a lot of people will just wait till the second generation but the coolness of Apple products probably cannot be underestimated.

Stephan: The Safari browser, the Mobile Safari browser that they built for the iPhone and for the iPad, it’s awesome. I mean I don’t think there’s any other way to say it and it’s fast, it’s renders quickly. It’s a good browser. So, I think people’s browsing experiences are going to be good.

Kevin: And by all reports, the fact that the iPad has a 1GHz processor in it makes that fast browser incredibly faster. Like, it’s a phone operating system and a phone browser running on something closer to a desktop hardware platform, and rather than add stuff to take advantage of that hardware grunt, at least in the first version, they’ve pretty much gone barebones with the feature set and as a result, this thing screams from what I’ve read.

Stephan: Yeah, and if you look at who they target and who goes into an Apple store—walk in to an Apple store and look at who’s there, it’s a lot of kids—and how many sites do they go to that have Flash, nowadays.

Kevin: That’s a good point. That’s a good point. If we’re talking about who’s going to buy it, it’s the experience they’re going to have going in to this store, they’re going to go, “Ooh! Here’s this device. Will it do what I want to do on the Web?”

They’ll play with it. They may load two or three sites and then, if it does what they want, they’ll take it home. So, what sites are they going to load? Maybe they’ll load YouTube and that’ll work well.

Stephan: Facebook.

Kevin: Facebook I think is a big one. Facebook has a nice iPhone experience but I suspect that on the iPad they’re just going to go with the default site because the only reason they did the iPhone specific site is because of screen real estate. I think the standard Facebook site will live very happily on the iPad screen but there are Facebook users and there are Facebook gamers.

I know there are people that only log in to Facebook these days— yeah, for Farmville!

Farmville is a Flash app and it’s not going to work. And there is no Farmville iPhone app. Short of them releasing a Farmville iPad app to replace the Facebook one—I could think of worst things for them to do. Short of them doing that, it’s not going to sell to the Farmville set. Are there any other big user group amongst the regular users out there who’re going to be put off by this device? I don’t think so.

Patrick: I think if Apple is smart, they’re going to make these deals, if they’re not already made, to work on the Apple devices. They’ve already got YouTube app right on the iPad homepage.

They obviously realize how big that is, a major situation, but it would be important, and so they’ve already taken care of it. I think that’ll happen more and more as we get a little closer maybe and they’ll have the major app for the main sites, and they’ll partner with those sites and they’ll be listed right on this page—YouTube, Facebook (maybe not MySpace), but other sites that people visit and they’re take care of that early.

Kevin: So, why are we so ready to cast Flash aside, is what I’m thinking. If they had said, “Well, it will support Flash but it won’t support JavaScript.” I think there would be pandemonium, rioting in the streets. No one would buy this thing if it didn’t have JavaScript. Is it because Flash is not used for critical web stuff or is it because Flash is not an open standard?

What is it for you, Brad, that makes you ready to just sort of go, “Well, Flash, it can be a casualty.”

Brad: I think it’s a little of both. I’m not a huge fan of Flash. We typically don’t use it on websites we build just because I know the limitations and this is a perfect example—why limit a possible user that could find your site on an iPhone or an iPad when you don’t have to just for some fancy little movie intro on your website.

But, again, I do see kind of like we’re discussing here. I understand there are users out there that 90% of their web experience is Flash, whether it be games, whether it be videos on Hulu. So, I think it’s a critical piece of the Internet as far as entertainment. I don’t think it’s a critical piece from the professional side of it which is kind of the side I’m on. I’m kind of either way on it; I don’t depend on Flash myself but I know a lot of people do.

Patrick: I don’t want to say the professional doesn’t matter but it kind of doesn’t matter. I don’t know. I think that this device isn’t going to be sold to the necessarily the hard core techie so much as a more general surfer. So, I think that’s why it’s so important—or at least why we’re talking about it—that is that if Flash works for it. I don’t know.

I know this podcast is aimed at the professional types but the professional types are, generally speaking, are just going to make adjustments and make their site work if they care about it all that much.

Kevin: But you’re right. Apple demoed this device sitting on a sofa. This is intended as a home sofa device. I’m sure there will be doctors and other people out there using this as a professional tablet with custom written software. But as far as using the functionality that ships in the box, I think it’s intended as a home user’s device.

Stephan: I was just going to go into the history of Flash when you look at it right and you look at—okay, it started out as, “Ooohh… make cool intros and menus and things,” and then it turned into the best option out there for people to stream video. That’s why it’s been so pervasive, right? I mean it’s not because it’s been some great functionality adder to websites. It’s because…

Kevin: God knows they’ve tried. They’ve definitely tried to position it that way. Things like Flex and even Air, to some extent, have been attempts to make Flash into an application development platform.

Stephan: Yeah, but they all required things that you had to install then on the desktop which was the beauty of it being built in to the browsers so they could stream video and you didn’t have to download anything extra, such as QuickTime stuff, and things like that.

Patrick: Flash’s installed base is definitely a plus, I think is what you’re saying.

Stephan: Oh, yeah. That’s the thing is that it’s there. YouTube took advantage of that and they said, “Everyone’s already got this. Let’s just stream video through it.” I think maybe it’s going to be Flash’s downfall that they’re— It’s not as a great as everyone thought it was.

Kevin: Right. Yeah, video became Flash’s success story and they haven’t really found their next success story but the gloss is kind of fading on Flash videos as its success story because browsers are starting to deploy native support for video.

Safari and Chrome both support H.264 encoded video. Firefox supports Ogg Theora, which is an open standard for video encoding, which gives you lower quality at the same bandwidth but it is an open standard and that’s why they’re sticking with it, and the HTML5 standard for embedding video let’s you create a video tag that includes both versions and so you can surf all three of those browsers with no plug-ins as long as you encode those two versions of the video and provide them on your server.

The more that becomes pervasive—and Internet Explorer, we’re looking at you—the more support those get, the less Flash becomes important as a video delivery mechanism.

I think Flash will continue to be used for a while, if only because of Internet Explorer, to deliver video but it’s no longer vital to have Flash because browsers like the one on the iPad are going to have native support for these HTML5 video. So, they can get away without Flash for video.

Like I said, there seems to be no next really important thing that we need Flash for. If you listen to Apple, the reason they have not put Flash support in their mobile browser, in their mobile Safari browser, isn’t because it’s not essential; it’s not because people don’t want it; it’s because Adobe have been unable to deliver a Flash player that doesn’t suck the life out of a battery or cause the browser to crash.

Do we buy this or is this their convenient marketing?

Stephan: I think it’s a little bit of both. You look at the player for YouTube, how’d they do that? They’re pulling the video out of somewhere, right?

Kevin: Well, like Patrick said, they saw it as a vital component of web browsing so they got in touch with YouTube; YouTube agreed to send them a QuickTime stream, an H.264 stream, which they could play in a native video player that Apple built themselves.

They really went out of their way for that one. They’re not going to do that for every website out there and, in fact, this browser-native support for H.264 video is kind of the way of saying, “Any other site who wants to do what YouTube did on our phone? Here’s how you can do it.”

Stephan: I’m noticing more sites offering QuickTime videos, and maybe that’s the way to go. It’s interesting to watch this. I don’t think Apple is intentionally trying to kill Flash. They’re not out there to go we want see Flash dead, but they’re not going to go out of their way to make sure Flash succeeds.

Kevin: There are plenty of Flash fans out there who are saying that’s exactly what Apple’s doing, though. They say, “Look, Flash is great and it is a powerful platform and it has super slick and easy to use developer tools. Apple doesn’t want to put it on their device because it competes with their super slick development tools for their closed App Store.”

Stephan: But see this is a terrible argument because people who invented cars didn’t intend on putting the blacksmith out of business. That wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to make transportation easier, right? And it just happened that blacksmith had to go out of business because they couldn’t horseshoes anymore. It’s just a casualty.

Patrick: But we mourn the loss of the blacksmith.

Stephan: We do.

Patrick: I’m just kidding.

Kevin: If you look at Flash on the Web as an application platform competing with Apple’s App Store, then is Apple guilty of unfair competition by saying “Well, we’re going to win that fight simply by cutting Flash out of our browser experience.” I don’t think so. I don’t think applications belonged in my web browser to begin with, to be honest.

Stephan: That’s a professional answer. (laugh)

Kevin: (laugh) Well, this is something I’ve felt for a long time like the web should be—uugghhh, I’m going to sound like, “Get off my lawn here.” But for me the web has always been at its best an interlinked collection of documents. It’s a publishing platform. Applications got thrown in there just because everyone has a web browser and people wanted to build applications that everyone could use without having to install them and every other attempt to deploy an application platform, ubiquitous enough to do that has failed and so people misused HTML and JavaScript to build things like Gmail and Google Docs and things like that, these desktop-like applications that live within a web page.

I think what Apple is doing is they’re saying. “We don’t think the Web should be like that either.” Their browser for the iPhone, their browser for the iPad is not optimized for things like that. If you think you’re going to be able to use Gmail happily, the web version of Gmail happily in your iPad browser you’re kidding yourself. The iPad browser is all about zooming to columns of text to make them easy to read and it’s not about hitting little toolbar buttons in your Gmail text editor to make things bold.

Apple’s answer to that is native applications. I’m wondering if the iPad is going to lead this exodus of web apps that should have never been web apps and make them into native apps for things like the iPad, things for the Google Android platform and whatever other hopefully more and more ubiquitous application platforms appear.

Stephan: We can hope.

Kevin: I’m hoping against hope.

Patrick: So what’s the comparable point for the desktop, I guess? Is it every single platform needs native apps if we keep it out of the browser? So you have the app for the iPad, iPhone, iTouch, you have the app for Android, you have the app for Blackberry, I suppose and then you have the desktop Mac, PC, different browsers. Does everything need an app? I mean does that go against the idea of open standards that some of us promote where it works on browsers? I mean how far should we take that notion of native apps?

Kevin: Well, I think there’s a whole spectrum. I mean I have to applaud Adobe for what they’ve done with the AIR platform. They’ve tried to provide an internet installable, ubiquitous app platform in Adobe AIR where you can write apps and they can run on all these desktop operating systems. The fact is that every time you do that, every time you do something more cross-platform you have something less native and with less of the convenience features that you’re used to in the truly native apps for your platforms. So if you’re a Mac user, a lot of AIR apps are not going to feel quite right compared to their native Mac equivalents.

But you’re right, Patrick; we can’t expect anyone who has something useful as an app to write a Windows version, a Mac version, an iPad version and whatever other versions are out there but people are doing that. I mean you look at something like Evernote which is a note taking platform that you can take everywhere—they market it as “your external brain”—and what they’ve done is they’ve built an iPhone version, they’ve built an Android version, they’ve got a Windows version and a Mac version and each of them is written from scratch to take advantage of the strengths of those platforms.

Stephan: And it is using a standard in the background, right?

Kevin: Yes.

Stephan: Maybe that’s the secret, right? I mean we’re going to come back to web services?

Kevin: It is a lot to ask if you want to play in the app ecosystem today. Do you have to write four native apps to get noticed? It is a lot to ask because each of those platforms is very different from a developer standpoint. I will grant you that.

To close this off, I have a question. If you were Adobe, what would you do? What is your play here? If we take for granted the fact that Flash isn’t going to get on to this device and people are going to buy it anyway, what’s your move?

My move if I’m Adobe is to move on. Build developer tools for the web technologies that people are moving to. If people are dropping Flash, I mean Adobe doesn’t make money off of people installing the Flash Player. They make money off of people buying the Flash Development Environment. But they also have Dreamweaver; they also have things like Illustrator which I think the next version is going to be able to export to HTML5 canvas. So invest more in those things.

Stephan: I agree. I say checkmate Apple and move on.

Patrick: That’s giving Apple a lot of power. A little too much. They’re not even the majority on the desktop.

Kevin: It is but what we’re saying is not that Adobe should become a creator of developer tools for Apple’s platform. I think they need to go open.

Patrick: Focus on the things that make them money. Flash doesn’t make them money.

Kevin: No, that’s true.

Stephan: So why not focus your business on, I think what they see Flash as is something to get their name out there, right? People know Adobe because of Flash. You ask someone if they know who Adobe is; they’re not going to know it from Lightroom. If I told someone I use Lightroom, they’re going to go, “What’s that?” unless they’re a photographer but I tell them, “Oh, you know that Flash Video.” “Oh Adobe, okay.” That makes sense to people. So I think that they’re counting on those people remembering the Adobe name and I really don’t think it makes them as much money as they want.

Kevin: Well the moneymaking attempt they made, they wanted to be where Apple is with their App Store. They wanted to get the Flash Player out there everywhere so that people could then buy applications built on things like Adobe AIR, although I’m not sure anyone has ever spent a penny on an Adobe AIR app, but that was their vision and then they would be selling the top-of-class development tools for that platform.

Patrick: Right. They make money with their Flash development tools and selling Creative Suite, which I believe probably has Flash in it. It did when I bought it. So you know there’s money being made but this isn’t to say that Adobe is in any trouble as a company. It’s not like there is Real Player or anything. I mean they are a healthy company, not to slam Real Player or like I don’t know; I’m old school and all that. I have some love for the past but at the same time, it’s like they’re a healthy company, they have great products, they have leading products like Creative Suite, like Dreamweaver like you said, like Photoshop obviously. So they’ll be fine. They’ll have to innovate or die I think as an Adobe person said on his blog—John Nack said that, and I think that’s the case with most products and we’ll see what they do from here and for all it’ll be better for it.

Kevin: I don’t think Flash is dead as an application development tool. They’re doing nice things with Flash CS5’s app exporter so you can build iPhone native apps based on a Flash application that you’ve developed. I think if they really work hard at making that good and making the apps that it generates highly performance apps with really nice interfaces. I think they might be able to get some leverage there, but apart from that exception, I think they really need to be refocusing on their strengths.

I think you’re right Stephan—checkmate. The game is over for trying to be for the big ubiquitous app platform. That’s just not Adobe’s strength, that not what they’re good at, much as they’ve tried.

On a lighter note, I think we need to bring the tone up here with our host spotlights guys.

Stephan, what have you got for us?

Stephan: I actually have something related. I was going to mention this earlier. I have something related to video in HTML5. It’s the Sublime Video Library, I guess it’s what you can call it. It’s a native HTML5 video player for HTML5 with no browser plug-in and no Flash dependencies and it supports Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. If there’s Internet Explorer, it falls back to Flash, which is pretty cool. It’s really neat. You can find that it’s done by Jilion, I think is how you say it; it’s a company somewhere in Europe. Looks like it’s pretty good work.

Patrick: It actually doesn’t support Firefox, yet.

Stephan: Oh, it doesn’t.

Patrick: They plan to add it. Right now, they only support Safari 4.0.4+, Chrome 4.0+, and IE with Google Frame which is IE with Google Chrome installed in it. Those are where it’s going right now, but they do plan to have Firefox support, and as you said, IE support by falling back to Flash, but I did want to take a look at it, but I couldn’t in my Firefox.

Stephan: I played with it a little bit today. It definitely has some bugs to it. It’s a little laggy. I’m guessing they’re still working on the streaming part of it, so maybe it’s just a latency thing on their end.

Patrick: It won’t be coming to YouTube anytime soon, I guess.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s not the next YouTube. It’s not ready.

Kevin: It’s brand new. This was actually going to be my host spotlight as well, Stephan…

Stephan: Haha—beat ya! Yesss!

Kevin: …and then when I saw you posted, I went “Noooooooo!” It’s early days—like it’s just been announced—and as a preview of what’s to come, it is super impressive. It’s really slick. If you do one thing with this demo, go to it in a browser that supports it (so Chrome or Safari) and start playing the video and then click the full screen button. It actually animates to fill your browser window, as the background sort of fades back as you get with some of these lightbox extensions for viewing slideshows. It is super, super slick.

Looking at some of the stuff people have written about it, it does really impressive things that—people were worried about that the native HTML5 video tag, one of the things it does, at least in the current version of the spec, is it auto buffers. Even if you go to a page that has a video on it and you don’t plan to watch that video, your browser starts downloading the video anyway, which is kind of a failing compared to some of the Flash players that you get out there, but what’s Sublime Video has managed to do here with some JavaScript trickery is make it so that the video doesn’t start downloading until you actually said I want to start watching it now.

It’s really beautiful and they’ve kind of take in the base platform of the HTML5 video tag and built on top of it and shown really what’s possible.

So yeah, when the public version comes out with Firefox support and Flash fallback support, it’s going to be really, really great.

Brad, what’s your spotlight?

Brad: My host spotlight this week is WhatBrowser.org and it does pretty much exactly what you would think. It tells you what browser you’re running. It’s a site that was set up by Google, some of the techies over at Google. It’s great for clients or maybe family members when you’re trying to figure out what browser they’re in, rather than try to walk them through what menu to go through and finding the About box, send them to WhatBrowser.org and it will pop up and tell you exactly what browser they’re running with the version.

It has some information about browsers too, so there’s a link that says a few useful tweaks and if you click on that, this will be tailored based on the browser you’re running; it will show you some very basic stuff—how to change your homepage, how to change your search engine, how to set your default browser.

Kevin: Wow, that’s cool.

Brad: It’s kind of nice. Send it over to like a newbie that doesn’t really know what they’re doing and it will just make it a little bit easier on you. I’ve been using it quite a bit lately. It’s a nice little tool.

Patrick: I noticed that it says “try a new browser” down there and it has Firefox, Chrome, and IE. I wonder how other people feel about that.

Brad: Yeah, it has all the browsers and stuff. It even has Opera listed first, which is interesting.

I think we’ve mentioned this on the previous show how anytime Google kind of promotes using a different browser, they never put Chrome first; they always put Chrome second, or third, or fourth, which is kind of odd. You would expect them to put Chrome at the front, but they have all the different browsers here that you can download and check out.

Stephan: Patrick, when you guys on Windows click on the “try a new browser,” does it actually give you an option to download Internet Explorer?

Patrick: No, it just goes to a second page. On the first page, all I get is Firefox, Chrome, and IE and then if you click on it, then it takes you to another page where you get linked to Opera, Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari in that order.

Stephan: Okay, so they do link to IE, though. I was just wondering if they just had—because on the Mac, they don’t even show the Internet Explorer. They just show the the “try a new browser,” and then there’s no link to Internet Explorer.

Kevin: I bet some of Google’s corporate support people are going to be making use of this soon. “Oh, see—the problem you have there is you’re using Internet Explorer 6, and we don’t support that anymore.”

Brad: I’m sure they’re using this site quite a bit.

Kevin: My spotlight is the SitePoint CSS Reference, which was just updated this week with all new browser compatibility tables. Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Chrome 4 all of that is now fully covered and great work to the two authors who put that together, Paul O’Brien and Tommy Olsson. Great work guys. Really excited to have that reference back up to date and it’s completely free at reference.sitepoint.com.

Patrick?

Patrick: Yes, I pull up the rear today. My site is wezen-ball.com. It will be linked on the podcast site to make it easy. Larry Granillo—author at the site—he’s calculating the stats of Charlie Brown from the Peanuts comic strip.

He’s going through each Peanut comic strip for baseball stats—the wins, the losses of Charlie Brown and assorted other details, highlights of the games, the first time something happened, and… Wins or losses are the big one, but there’s a lot of general interesting factoids in the—

Kevin: Did he ever win?

Patrick: Right now, Granillo has done the 1950s and the 1960s with more to come. Right now, for the 1960s, it’s a losing record. It’s very bad, and I’m trying to pull it up, but the site is moving slowly, but he’s definitely not, as you might imagine, a winner.

He also tracks a number of times that he’s been knocked off the mound by a line drive.

It’s just a really fun piece, although research in a serious manner, but it’s a great read and really one of the great little—just one of those pieces that is just fun to read.

Kevin: Well thank you Patrick. I saved yours for last because I knew it would be fun.

Patrick: (laugh)

Kevin: So that brings another episode of the SitePoint Podcast to a close. Guys?

Brad: I’m Brad Williams with WebDevStudios and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy network, on Twitter @iFroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Seagraves. You can find me on Twitter @sseagraves or read the blog at badice.com.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience and you can follow SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint Podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show.

The last giveaway we did—the SitePoint PDF of your choice giveaway for an iTunes review—was really successful, so we’re doing it again.

If you want to win yourself a free copy of the SitePoint book of your choice in PDF format, simply go to the iTunes Store that you use and leave a review on the SitePoint Podcast. This helps us promote the show and gain rank in the iTunes podcast directory. So you could really help us out with that and once you’ve left that review, come back to the SitePoint Podcast and copy and paste your review in as a comment, so we know that you’ve left it. We will then award a free PDF to someone.

Hey, the odds were really good last time, I’ll be honest with you. If you left a review, you were in a handful of people in the running. Definitely do it, and you’ll be surprised at just how lucky you might be.

So that’s it. The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank.

Thanks as always for listening. Bye bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #3: A Richer Web?
2. SitePoint Podcast #9: SitePoint at SXSWi
3. SitePoint Podcast #1: The Economy

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Interview Transcript

Patrick: January 29th, 2010. Social media strategist Jim Turner stops by to chat about supporting good causes through social media. This is the SitePoint Podcast #46: Using the Internet for Good with Jim Turner.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and it’s interview time yet again; today, we’re speaking with Jim Turner. Jim is the man behind One By One Media, which specializes in getting the most out of blogging and social media. He runs Bloggers For Hire, a service dedicated to matching professional bloggers with companies in need of their skills. He served as the conference director and social media director for Blog World and New Media Expo held last October. On Twitter, he’s @Genuine.

The reason that I wanted to bring Jim on today was so that we could talk about using the Internet for good. Jim is no stranger to this, and he recently completed a 24 hour telethon to benefit Haiti. He raised money and awareness with a number of guests stopping by including myself during his 24 consecutive hours on the mic. In this interview he shares his experiences putting together this endeavor, and offers advice that you can apply to help the causes that matter to you most.

Patrick: Hey Jim, it’s great to have you on the show.

Jim: Thanks for having me.

Patrick: First of all, congratulations on the telethon. It was an honor to be a part of it.

Jim: Well, we really had a great response from all the different people that called in and were guests, and certainly, Patrick, you stepped up and actually I think you were at 1 o’clock in the morning or something by your clock and having done it 24 hours, it’s all a blur to me now. I have to kind of go back and recreate the wheel and figure out all the different guests that I had, but it was great having you too.

Patrick: Well thank you. Let’s go backwards a little bit. How did you first have the idea to do the telethon?

Jim: I was sitting down watching the Haiti relief efforts and certainly, a lot of the first images that were coming out of Haiti on Thursday, obviously that was a couple of days after the first quake that had caused most of the damage. I was watching, and all of the different images that were coming were on video from CNN and from NBC and a few of the other places that I was watching, and I just happened to see a small child and being a father of four—of a 10-year-old, a soon to be 9-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 4-year-old—I really kind of had an outpouring for the children that were part of the destruction and the mayhem that was going on down there. I was especially paying attention to those smaller children because they really don’t have an idea of what the destruction has really caused them in their lives and what it’s going to cause. So I just wanted to do something.

I had the idea that I would look at my bank account and say, “Gosh, what can I give?” I didn’t have what I wanted to give. So I tried to think of other ways that I could give to the Haiti relief effort. I thought, “Gosh, why don’t you try to use social media. That seems to be your bailey wig, so why don’t you try to use that?”

I quickly got on the phone and I said, “What can we do?” Chris Noble, who is the CEO of WhatGives!? and Causemedia Group—he’s my non-profit guy and does a lot of causes—and he said, “I’m in, whatever you want to do.” So that’s when we came up with the idea of doing the telethon and wsRadio jumped into helping us. It was just one of those things where it was just a small idea that just jumped off the page at me and away we went.

Patrick: Okay, so you have the idea, let’s talk about the actual execution of the idea. So you reach out to some partners, you share ideas, you get things going. How quickly did this come together as far as— I know you took a flight, you were in the studio. Talk about that a little bit, kind of a logistics behind accomplishing the idea.

Jim: Well, I first had to figure out what vehicle we were going to use for this telethon – was I going to do it on USTREAM, was I going to do it on Skype, was I going to do it as just a part of my own webcam here at my office in front of my computer? How were we going to communicate what we were trying to do and how are we going to try to do it? I’ve been doing internet radio now for about three years and one of the companies that I’ve been working with recently is wsRadio and they’ve been around on internet TV for … gosh, nearly I guess 10 years now or something like that. They were the first people that I reached out to and actually asked if it was possible because they would need to set aside studio time and also set aside time on the Internet itself because they have a lot of different shows that are ongoing at present. They would need to set aside a place and a vehicle for that to happen.

I reached out to them and they said, “Gosh, Jim, what you’re undertaking has not been done before by us and we really are not sure we have that ability. Let us call you back.” Within a half hour, they called back and they said, “We’re going to make it work. We’re not quite sure of all the logistics yet, but we’re going to make it work. When you get off that plane, you’ll have a place to have your 24-hour telethon.”

I hopped on the plane and flew out there to the studios out in San Diego and when I showed up, they said, “We’re ready to roll. You’re in studio B. You have 24 hours beginning at 6 o’clock this evening.” It was really kind of crazy. It took about 40 hours/48 hours for all the things to come together. It was Thursday morning when I had the idea and then by Sunday morning when I jumped on the plane, we were pretty close to having all of our guests lined up and a pretty good idea of how we were going to be able to donate the money and what charities we would be talking about and some of those kinds of things.

It really took the efforts of everyone to put it all together.

Patrick: “You have the studio for 24 hours, there’s the restroom, here’s a coffeemaker. Good luck.”

Jim: Exactly. They took me to the store beforehand and said, “Well, you better stock up on what supplies you need,” and I asked, “Do you have coffee?” They said, “We’ve got the coffee covered,” and so I bought some energy drinks and some caffeinated sodas and away we went. Actually, I bought some chocolate, too, because I figured I’m going to have to keep my blood sugar up to do this for 24 hours. There were a couple of moments when I thought there’s no way I’m going to make it another 10 minutes doing this without taking a break and going to sleep. We had one 15-minute break and each time that I finished a segment, we had about 4 minutes between segments.

Patrick: The next time that you do this, you have to go out and actually have Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy on speed dial as sponsors. There you go.

Jim: That’s exactly right. We frankly, are actually planning another 24-hour telethon coming up here March 25th or 26th—I’m not quite sure of the date yet. Because it was such a success and because we were able to pull it off with a little bit of help from our friends, so to speak, they want to do it again for Twestival coming up here at the end of March. I don’t know if you know about Twestival, but it’s a very large charitable party basically. Each city hosts their own Twestival, if you will, and it’s a 24-hour period and they raise money for water safety and charitable organizations. So we’re going to be doing it again, coming up here in March.

Patrick: So you said you have the idea Thursday, hopped on a plane on Sunday and at that point, you had most of the guests lined up. Obviously, you’re well versed in streaming, web business, social media, and all those things and well connected. At the same time, talk about how you— I know how much— I wanted to talk about how you went about getting the guests, how you collected those people and how someone who maybe doesn’t have as large a following could do so.

Jim: Certainly, we all have our networks, whether it be at our church, whether it be the PTA at school, or even just your local neighbors. We all have kind of our communities and our networks that we reach out to. I particularly had a large number of followers on Twitter. I have a lot of people that follow me on Facebook and certainly, I belong to communities of social media people and that’s my business, so I make my business to know those people in my business.

I had a lot of different friends that I reach out to and said, “Can I rely on you to come on the show? This is something crazy that I’ve tried to put together,” and most of the responses were, “Gosh Jim, I can’t believe you’re going to do this. I certainly want to be a part of it.”

So what I did is I sent out some emails to those folks that I thought could also ask their community, places that maybe I couldn’t reach to, so I could cast a further net from that standpoint and they reached out to some people. Because of the fact that I follow most of my friends and people here in the United States, I didn’t have a big following over in Europe and in that area because I’m not awake during the time that they’re awake and it’s just kind of— Well, actually, I am awake when they’re awake, but that’s a whole different story. But from what I was trying to accomplish, I needed to have guests from each one of the time zones to kind of help carry the show through the time zones that we had available in 24 hours because other than that, we would be talking to dead air online and nobody would be able to talk to us.

I wanted to reach out to all those different places, and Chris Garrett over in UK reached out to his network of people in the UK. I had Ewan Spence from Edinburgh, Scotland on, and he reached out to a few of his folks and it just kind of started that butterfly effect. I used that in the show itself, was that a beat of wings in South America can start a Texas tornado, and that’s really kind of what it did is it just became a little bit viral within my own community. I didn’t have to reach out to that many people. We had 24 hours and I scheduled an hour for each guest and then we had call-ins and special guests that I didn’t hear from before that wanted to join and we were able to fit them in.

If you’re really trying to reach out to that network, start with your close friends – they have two friends and they have two friends and it’s really that type of what I call virality that we use in order to get a message from one place to the next. It’s kind of like, maybe I’ll get a little geeky here, but in the Twin Towers [Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers —Ed.] movie when they wanted to get people across the other side of the mountains, they just kept lighting fires on each mountaintop until they could say the signal is here kind of thing. That’s all I did – was I just started a fire in a few of my friends and the fire ended up across the other side of the planet.

Patrick: I think part of the message is just not to be intimidated. I know hosts of small podcasts that have maybe ten listeners. But, hey, they reach out to people and they secure guests that have followings of thousands, tens of thousands of people—major television, radio personalities will hop on a small show. I think part of this trouble, part of the problem is always the commitment of asking and the fear of rejection, but I think that at the end of the day, you’d probably be surprised by how much people in general are willing to help.

Jim: Absolutely. Certainly, I was very surprised at the end of the broadcast there, as we were beginning to start to wrap up and things is even the people locally there in San Diego got wind of what we were doing and the local television station had called up and said, “Gosh, we’ve got a crew over at the airport. Can we come over and see what you guys are doing?” They’d never made it because of the rain that is going on out there in San Diego right now, but people like LaDainian Tomlinson’s mother called me and because she’s interested in what we were doing… I think once you get a couple of people that are influencers within a certain organization, those influencers will reach out and say somebody is doing something fun here, they’re doing something good, or they’re talking about something interesting.

It only takes a couple of influencers to really reach out to a few people that really grow that audience and grow your message to the size that you’re looking for. So it really was an instance where the influencer in a group—and it can be a group of 5, it can be a group of 5,000—but that one person that says, “Hey, pay attention to what’s going on over here”—it’s kind of like when someone speaks, other people listen. That’s the saying is when someone speaks, a certain person will listen and that’s person that’s listening can speak again and it just grows in that ripple effect, throwing a pebble in a pond.

If you cast your pebbles in the right places, those pond ripples will certainly reach those that you’re looking for.

Patrick: In producing the show, what do you think were the biggest challenges that you faced or what were the things that presented themselves as roadblocks along the way?

Jim: Well, you mean besides staying awake for 24 hours?

Patrick: Yeah, besides that.

Jim: I think that was the difficult part for myself. Reaching out and talking to folks at wsRadio was great. They already knew all of the technology and they had all the ability with the recording that they were doing. They did some voiceover work to begin the first part of that, so a lot of the ground work had already been laid.

I think part of some of our technology problems is we tried to bite off more than we could chew this first time by live-streaming it via USTREAM. We had some limited abilities there from the technology standpoint. Because it was in a radio station studio itself, it didn’t have the ability to put that out on internet live video because we didn’t have the necessary equipment to run the audio out into USTREAM’s live stream.

So you could hear me talking to my computer screen, which is what we were using for a webcam was just my basic laptop. You could hear me speaking into my laptop, but you couldn’t hear the guest that was calling in or the guest that we were speaking to on the phone or whatever the vehicle was that they were using.

Those were some of the challenges that we had were technology. We can try to act like CNN or MSNBC or FOX News or whatever the case is and it’s difficult for us as just technologists and geeky types to make all of that work with the limited budgets that we have that we’re doing. Everything that we did was basically free or supported by people that we’re giving us their time and using that for pay. They had all of the equipment. They were using their airtime. Our guests were all volunteer guests they weren’t paid guests in any respect.

The challenges, I think, were mostly technology-related. The other thing, again, like I said, we had a lot of challenges trying to find people in time zones that could help us talk during those dead hours of where we were. Certainly, having someone call in from the Canary Islands and having someone call in from Scotland and the UK made it a lot easier from that standpoint and then being in San Diego, it was a 3-hour time difference from the East Coast. As people began to wake up on the East Coast, people were still in the middle of slumber where we were in San Diego. So just having the challenges of creating a time clock for all of the different places that we had to have speak – that was part of the challenging things, too.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean it went pretty smoothly even with that said. I think the one thing I noticed was keyboard cat kept sneaking in and playing people off in a surprising manner.

Jim: That’s exactly right.

Patrick: I remember I—and speaking of the time clock—my segment, which was 12 to 1 a.m. my time and then I stayed up and kind of hung around the channel for a half hour, 1:30, 1:45, got to bed around there, and Dave Taylor who came in when I was on – this is Dave Taylor, AskDaveTaylor.com – and he came in, re-Tweeted me or whatever, was in the chat room while I was on for a few minutes and then he said he’s going to be on at, I think, it was 7 a.m. his time, so it’s 9 a.m. my time. So I went to bed at 2, I got up 9, 9:15, and popped the computer and hey, still going strong, Dave is on the air, and now I was in the chat room for a while to support that. It’s also giving, but it’s also a fun thing when we get a chance to talk to each other and when we all get a chance to – meeting in person, obviously, we have a lot of fun. Well, it’s nice if you’re working at the conference then you’re kind of running around.

Other than that, this is fun for us to talk to each other and hopefully along the way, I guess, you generate awareness and some money and then help some people out.

Jim: Absolutely, and the other thing is that even the people that were guests – were people that may not have been known in other social media circles or other circles that I reach out to, so some of the people even within our own industry got to meet each other for the first time. You used Dave Taylor as an example and Dave was one of my original people that I had reached out to because Dave is an influencer within my own community. I said, “Dave, would you be able to come on and help?” He was very much right in the mix right then and said, “I’m in, count me for whatever you need. If you need a break, I can help co-host. I can do whatever you want to do.” Those were the people that were great.

But at the same time, Alex Carvajal from Miami across the country—he and Dave got to meet the very first time and speak to each other, but yet they maybe in the same industry and the same—maybe colleagues—and that really helped introduce some of those people. Some of the people that we’re on the show actually, for the first time, were discovered by other people that might also be in our industry, but they just never had an opportunity to see them.

They got to see each other on Twitter and now we’ve made other friends just as a result of opening up the technology to those people that wouldn’t otherwise have that ability.

Patrick: So when you do something like this, it’s not just about money, it’s not just about numbers, it’s about awareness and that really can’t always be measured, but do you have any ideas as far as the traffic that was generated to the sites that were being promoted? Have you heard any kind of information as far as the number of people that were driven to the stream or to wsRadio?

Jim: Within the 24-hour period, I know that we had some retweets of the HART hashtag – that’s #HART, which is the hashtag that we used for the event so that we could help track it and help get an idea of who was listening and who was doing their participation in it. We have a little over a thousand of retweets of that particular hashtag, which within the 24-hour period is pretty good reach. We had 27 guests on and I’m trying to compile the numbers now, but to give you an idea, their readership of just a couple of people combined; they had readers of their blogs that reached over a million readers.

It takes just a small amount of people to get together and that’s part of what the message was in trying to get the telethon together is even if you’re just donating a dollar to the cause, if a million people donate a dollar—that’s huge. What we were trying to accomplish is just again, make some awareness, but also help our charities out and getting them some exposure.

When the 27—let’s just call it 20, there was probably 27 or 28 guests, I think that we had online—but if each one of them just Tweeted out and said, “Come check out the page here or come check out this donated page.” If they Tweeted that out to all of their different followers, I think if I counted it up correctly, we had a little over a million people that could have had access to that. And then of course, the next day, sites like Mashable had covered it and again, linked to the site. Mashable has 500,000 RSS subscribers. Those kinds of numbers we’re still trying to compile and get all of an idea.

I’m going to actually come up with a blog post that will recap all of those numbers and the people that we reached and the people that we touched, if you will, and then try to wrap our head around what that might look like in a graph form or certainly within a return on investment form is the big thing that we’re trying to come up with in social media these days, but that’s what it is that the charities need. Quite frankly, it’s something that individuals that donated money – what they would love to see is, “Did my dollar help? Where did it go? How much of a shadow did it cast?”

Patrick: We’ve talked a fair amount about strategy and about the people behind this sort of effort, but let’s talk about the tools, I guess. Again, we talked about this a little bit too, but the tools that you used to accomplish this—you mentioned USTREAM—to stream and have a chat room. What are the tools that people need to utilize as far as technology, as far as social media tools that were really invaluable to you and that would be invaluable to someone who was tackling an effort like this?

Jim: I think that was part of the other message that I wanted to get across is that the power of social media can actually move mountains. It can help people and it can certainly start something as small as an idea on Thursday morning after seeing a small little girl in Haiti, and reach a worldwide audience in a matter of just hours.

That’s really what I wanted to kind of get that message across, but the tools that really I used, obviously, were email. Everybody says email is dead and I think email is actually the lifeblood or the backbone of social media in and of itself. Being able to email your friends and the people that you’ve reached out to in the past, many of our email applications that we use now kind of will keep tract of who you have emailed in the past, and that’s kind of your database that you can go to and say, “Let’s send this out to as many people as possible so that we can get the best reach.”

Really, email was where I started and I started with just a few friends and then asked them to forward this on to your friends and have them forward it on to as many people. I think email was really kind of what got the spark started from that standpoint, and then I started sending out on Twitter things like “More to come, we’re going to do a telethon, pay attention here, keep track of what we’re doing. We’re going to be using the #HART hashtag”—those kinds of things. We really reached out on the Twitter stream as well and other folks that didn’t know what HART meant or didn’t know what we were talking about would come and they would pay attention and then go, “Oh, yeah, let’s help them with this cause.”

Everybody wants to help where they can and a lot of people just Tweeted. That’s all they did—was they sat back and they said, “Well, anytime Jim Tweets something out that’s of interest, which was obviously not huge, but when he does, let’s retweet it so that that sends it on to our followers.” I tried again with Facebook, sending out updates as to what we were doing and where people could come. Obviously, Facebook is another social network that is being used.

I used Skype – we had Skype, people calling in from Skype. Obviously, a lot of carriers out there are very expensive when you make international calls and so Skype is a more inexpensive option there. That was one of the other technology things I probably could have mentioned is that we didn’t have the ability to do audio-in from Skype directly. We couldn’t talk from Skype user to Skype user and have it come out as audio in the internet radio, but those are lessons learned of things that might be able to work on in the future; obviously with video-to-video type setups with Skype now and tools like ooVoo and tools like USTREAM that we talked about, we can actually have the people come on using their own webcams.

I was using my webcam again because we didn’t have much time to put it together. Something that we want to do for the next telethon is to use actual professional cameras where we can go from camera angle to camera angle and make it more of a newsy look to it. We’re going to plan on using that next time and we are looking for sponsors. Anybody out there that are videographers that want to help out with Twestival, you can certainly do that.

There are a lot of different things—those kinds of tools that we used. Internet radio—anybody can be a radio star. I have no background in broadcasting. I have no background in voiceovers or any other kind of specialized knowledge. I loved podcasting. I love the idea of generating content online just by voice because I hate typing. For the most part, if I could, I suppose, podcast everything it’d be great, but until they come up with search features on podcasting, we’re kind of limited as to how people can find our podcasts, but we used iTunes also because it went out on iTunes as far as the first recorded issue and we put it out over the iTunes.

What other tools did we use? Mobile phones—everybody had a mobile phone that was calling in. I think we’re living in a mobile world. We’re going to be living more in a mobile world. One of our technology problems was the player that they used for internet radio is only available on Windows Mobile Applications or actually Windows Media Player, so it only worked on Microsoft phones that were enabled to listen to Windows Media Player on their phones. So, an iPhone and a BlackBerry and a lot of those couldn’t listen in from that standpoint.

So there’s a lot of technology yet that we still have to conquer, but we had a pretty wide range of audience that we reached and we went global. I got emails from people from other parts of the planet that we never talked to that actually listened in and paid attention to what we were doing. Really, the technology was outstanding and quite frankly, it didn’t cost us anything. We used all of the available stuff that’s either in the Cloud or on Open Source or basically free software.

Patrick: Right, and I think that’s a great point to make is that even though there’s great value in having a newsier setup, as you said, that takes time to plan that, takes some more budget and so on. You can still accomplish something like this, similar, using free or low-cost tools, using USTREAM or other streaming services, using Skype to make calls, using the social media tools—Twitter, Facebook, and so on—which are free to use to talk with your existing community, the people you know already to make them aware of the situation. That’s just one of the examples of the Internet and making something that’s already great even greater.

That’s what I always say is that “Internet has made a great stuff greater, but it has made the best stuff worse.” I think that’s pretty true, but one of the tools that I wanted to ask you about was donation tools like, I guess, widgets and things that enable people to more easily and quickly donate. Are there any recommended tools there?

Jim: Well certainly, eBay and PayPal will make it easy and simple from that standpoint. In our case, it just so happened that PayPal stepped up and allowed us to use widgets that they already had in place for the charities that we were using. They have gone through and made it very seamless and very easy from that standpoint. A lot of the nonprofits out there are actually using these types of widgets to make it easy to give to them now, but certainly PayPal is one of them. There’s ChipIn, there’s all kinds of different available and again free services out there where you can actually set up, donate buttons or ChipIn buttons.

We recently as a group in the podcasting world, even. Tee Morris’ wife suddenly passed away unexpectedly and he needed help with some medical bills and the costs related to that, and his community realized that he needed help and they all just pitched in and reached out to their own network and again as a classic example of something that went viral very quickly. He has touched the lives of a lot of people within his own organization and now has touched lives outside of his own community and network. We just started a small widget to donate to his cause in ChipIn and thousands of dollars later, we’ve had a bunch of people that donated a dollar, donated $5—but we got a whole bunch of people to respond to that.

That’s just another classic example of using a widget to help do that and there’s widgets out there for short term, there’s widgets out there for long term, and just a little bit of research and find out what’s the best and what’s the easiest to use, and most of them have just embed codes.

Those of you that are on website or on a blog or whatever it is, it’s just a matter of cut and pasting a little piece of code into the proper place. I don’t get it right every time. I had to set up the widget on our site and messed it up like three times before we go, “Oh, okay that’s where we did wrong and that’s what we were supposed to do,” and get the proper returns in here and returns in there, but it’s very, very simple to get that up on your site.

If you’re trying to monetize your podcast and some of those kinds of things, a donate button—“Donate if you enjoyed what you’ve listened to today. Hit the donate button and give us a buck” kind of thing, and over time, that really adds up.

Patrick: Yeah, and it’s good that you mentioned Tee Morris because that was a case I was thinking of too and another recent one was Liz Strauss who had some health issues and I remember Deb Ng and Lucretia Pruitt and Jenn Fowler put together a little effort in a very short of period of time; they raised thousands of dollars. I think they had a goal of 1000 and 3000, then 5000 and finally it reached $5460.05, can you tell I prepared for this show?

Jim: I’m going to say—“Wow, that’s some memory there!”

Patrick: I knew where this conversation would go, but I think this is such a beautiful thing. It’s such a great thing to see that happen and it’s really the melding of communities. Another example—you’re no stranger to charitable efforts, of course, because at Blog World Expo, which was held in October where you’re the conference director, social media director—you had Beat Cancer, which raised over $70,000 for cancer patient restorations and also set a Guinness World Record for the “distribution of the largest mass message through social media”—that’s according to Mashable. I mean, that was a huge, huge event as well.

Jim: Just as a classic example as well of really using networks. Obviously with Blog World Expo, we had everybody who is anybody in social media and across networks and forums and websites. We had just about everybody there that was anybody and if they were an influencer, they were at our event, and to reach out to those people and say, “Hey, we’d like to break a world record.” They get that ego stroke and they go, “Well, I can have a million people say it right now, so let’s do that,” and that’s really kind of what we were talking about.

Don Lemmon from CNN and those folks were very instrumental in allowing us to put on that kind of campaign and it really did show the power of social media and social networking and really kind of reaching out to your networks and we had the #beatcancer hashtag. It trended on Twitter for almost two days after the fact, so I mean it was just a situation where an idea comes out that people want to latch onto and it’s like watching crazy cats on keyboards. Once it gets started, it doesn’t stop. It just keeps growing and keeps growing, which is kind of a wonderful experience when you’re doing something for good.

Patrick: I think in general that speaks to something we’ve talked about a few times today—the power of community and we talked about this on the telethon as well. I think a lot of people don’t think of their … whatever, however they think of it, their Twitter followers, their Facebook friends, their MySpace friends as a community, but don’t get caught up in the terms. Don’t get caught up in the word ‘community.’ Maybe you don’t like that word, but you have people that you know, I mean that’s your community – the people that listen to you, the people that you talk with, and it doesn’t have to be – you don’t have to be someone with 10,000 Twitter followers or 100,000 Twitter followers. You can be someone that has a hundred followers and those followers listen to every word you say and they pass it on and retweet it and then their audiences are exposed to it. Those people have blogs and other presences and it just can catch on like wildfire. Not to discourage people, but there is something to be said for having this community built when you don’t need it, when you don’t want to help someone or when you don’t have an effort you want to help.

Being a part of these tools is maybe—I don’t know, I never really got into this starting out and thinking, well I need to get X number of people so that when I have this effort, we can support it. But it is a nice side benefit that you do have that established base that when you do have something worthwhile, you can share it, and that’s not a reason to start using Twitter or start using any of these tools, but it’s an understanding, I guess, of the fact that you do have an audience and that you can use that audience for good, and it’s not just streaming.

I think that’s what the Tee Morris Fund Raising Show is and Liz Strauss and even Beat Cancer. Yes, maybe there wasn’t streaming in there, but a lot of this is just blog post—Twitter, face to face. We’re talking about streaming today because that’s what Jim did, but it can be anything. You can put together online any piece of content you can put together.

Text-based movements happen. Forums, blogs, Facebook, Twitter—you can raise a lot of money, help a lot of people through these mediums; so maybe you’re not a radio person or a television person. I know neither of us were before doing it. Maybe you don’t want—maybe it’s uncomfortable for you. Maybe you don’t want to get in front of the camera or put a headset on, and I totally respect that. Maybe you’re a good writer and then you can use that skill.

Jim: Right, and for those people that think that you just don’t matter or that I’m just a small fish in a very large pond, you can grow your community without much effort. Quite frankly, all you have to do is sign up a Twitter and I can guarantee that there’s going to be 20 people find you on Twitter that you’ve never met before or never knew before because they’re searching for people just like you that might have the same kind of interests that they have.

If you’re a person that enjoys knitting or if you like to play golf or whatever the case may be—if you have an interest, you can find likeminded people that also have that same interest and your community will grow exponentially before your eyes. If you’re afraid perhaps to go out and participate, I would challenge everybody just to perhaps get on Facebook, get on Twitter, and find out if you belong into a community and how then you can participate and contribute to that community.

There’s a lot of things that I learn from people everyday that just get on Twitter or they just have recently got into social networking and I’ll meet someone that says something very, very smart that, gosh, I’m so glad that I’ve found that person because they’ve enriched my life.

So if you’re afraid to really start a community, don’t be afraid. It will start itself. You’ll find that your community grows exponentially over time and that you’ll really enjoy talking with those people.

Patrick: I think that’s a great way to close this out, but before we leave, I wanted to ask you, what are the secret means of staying awake for 24, probably 30—how many hours were you up? How do you stay awake? Is there some sort of secret, is it pills, is there some miracle drink, how did you do it?

Jim: Well, talking to people obviously is a lot of fun and Patrick, you and I have been out to events where we sit and we talk to each other until 2 o’clock in the morning and then you go back and then you check your email and those kind of things and the reason you get tired is because you stopped swimming. It’s like sharks—if you stop swimming you’re going to drown. You have to just keep going and keep talking and there were a couple of moments there where I was talking to myself and thinking about answering. There was a moment there when I got that whole Jack Nicholson typing on the typewriter—Jack will be a good boy kind of thing, it was strange, but it was kind of out of body experience.

You have to listen. You have to listen and you have to talk. I guess the other secret is, again, lot of energy drinks, some chocolate and good friends—that’s really what it comes down to.

Patrick: Great stuff, Jim. Thanks for joining us today and for doing good things. I look forward to seeing you down in Austin for South by Southwest.

Jim: I’ll see you there.

Patrick: Again, that was Jim Turner the owner of One By One Media and Bloggers For Hire.

Thankyou for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, and I’m on Twitter @iFroggy.

You can follow SitePoint @sitepointdotcom.

Do you have any thoughts about this interview? Please visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have any questions for us; we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next week!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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Related posts:

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2. SitePoint Podcast #16: Online Marketing Inside Out
3. SitePoint Podcast #18: Internet Explorer 8 … Percent?

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Google, China, and Germany’s advice to its citizens to stop using IE

• Stop Using Internet Explorer Warns German Government (SitePoint)
• Why Is Europe Abandoning Internet Explorer? (The Atlantic Wire)
• Hackers Wield Newest IE Exploit in Drive-by Attacks (Computerworld)
• Microsoft To Emergency Patch IE As The Web Gathers With Pitchforks Around IE6 (TechCrunch)

Twitter Connect

• Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect (TechCrunch)

One Third of US Adults Online Update Their Social Network Regularly

• Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder (Groundswell)
• One Third of U.S. Internet Users Now Post Status Updates Once per Week (ReadWriteWeb)

Oracle and the Future of MySQL

• MySQL Co-founder Doubts Oracle Support (CBR Online)
• Oracle Won’t Kill MySQL, Says Co-Founder (InformationWeek)

Mozilla Jetpack and the Future of Add-ons

• Mozilla Denies Ditching Add-Ons for JetPack (SitePoint)
• Oracle Won’t Kill MySQL, Says Co-Founder

Host Spotlights:

• Patrick: Attacking the Social Media Lynch Mob
• Stephan: BasicInstructions comic
• Brad: ICQ 7

Haiti Relief: whatgives.com/haiti

Show Transcript

Patrick: Hello and welcome to another edition of the SitePoint podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe filling in for our usual co-host, Kevin Yank. As usual, I’m joined by Brad Williams and Stephan Segraves, and before we get started tonight, I just wanted to announce the situation in Haiti — obviously, a very difficult situation.

The people of Haiti are dealing with a tragic disaster right now, and if you can do something, I encourage you to do it whether that’s donating or helping in some way, whether it’s $1 or $3, $5. What may be a small amount to you can be put together with other people’s small amounts and together can become something big and have a large impact in the country. So donate to your favorite charity or if you need help, visit whatgives.com/Haiti for a list, and our thoughts and prayers are with the people affected by this situation.

So with that said, Brad and Stephan will be heading on the road and will be appearing in Boston this Saturday, January 23rd, isn’t that right guys?

Brad: It’s Boston.

Stephan: Ashland.

Patrick: I lived in Ashland for 10 years so, you know, give me a pass there.

Brad: Yeah, we’re going to WordCamp Boston. I’m looking forward to it. I’m actually giving a presentation on WordPress security and I will be participating in the Ignite round, which is basically where you get 15 seconds of slides. The slides auto progress, so it goes very, very quickly and that presentation will be on the 20 WordPress plugins that you’ve never heard of. So I’m looking forward to seeing Stephan again and joining another great WordCamp.

Patrick: Sounds a little like an Ignite presentation.

Brad: Ignite, yeah, I thought I said Ignite.

Patrick: Oh, did you? Okay, sorry. Yeah, Ignite WordCamp. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Brad: Yeah, it should be great.

Patrick: And Stephan, are you just headed up there as attendee — Brad’s supporter and so forth?

Stephan: Yeah, I’m moral support for Brad.

Brad: He’s in my fan club.

Patrick: He flies all the way there to see Brad speak but he can’t drive an hour or whatever it is to Austin to see me.

Stephan: We had this discussion. I’ll be at South by Southwest this year.

Brad: In the hallways?

Stephan: In the hallways.

Patrick: At the end of this episode, we will also be announcing the winner of our iTunes Review PDF giveaway, so stay tune for that. And with that said, let’s get into our first story of the day. On episode 43 of the podcast we talked about MySQL founder, Monty — Michael Widenius — and his efforts to get MySQL stripped out of the package that Oracle acquires when it completes its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

We have a little bit of an update — the perspective of the other co-founder of MySQL. His name is David Axmark and I found the story through the twittering of Zack Urlocker and also a story at Information Week by Bob Evans, but Axmark told CBR that he doesn’t believe that Oracle has a real reason to support MySQL and that in itself sounds pretty gloomy as well. But his perspective is a little more brighter than his fellow co-founder because he feels that Oracle is unlikely to kill off MySQL and that their current customers shouldn’t be badly affected by it.

He says, “I doubt that they’d kill anything. Will they aggressively sell to companies that Oracle can sell to? Never. Will it hurt the current MySQL customers? Probably not. There’s no money to be made for them there.”

He advises Oracle, he says if he was Oracle, he would aim MySQL even farther at the web sector where Oracle doesn’t have anything, in his words “some more development, more usage and they don’t really lose any revenue”. He says he would aim MySQL at the enterprise sector where Oracle already has a strong presence.

Guys, does this make you feel a little bit better about the Oracle acquisition of Sun and MySQL falling into their hands?

Brad: Not really. I mean, I don’t think they even come out and if they did have plans or had even thought about dropping MySQL, they’re not going to come out and say it — especially not right now before any decision about them acquiring Sun has happened. So I guess it’s really hard to say what’s going to happen. Most of the listeners out there know I’m pretty involved in open source and just about every open source web product out there runs off of MySQL, so it’s definitely a hot topic in many open source communities out there. So we’re definitely keeping an eye on it. It will be interesting to see how they rule, if they’re even allowed to purchase Sun. It looks like they have to have a verdict in by the 27th of this month. So we should know by then which way this is going to go.

Patrick: Stephan?

Stephan: You know I think he makes me feel a little better, but I’m still a little leery to say that I feel comfortable that MySQL will still be around in a few months.

Patrick: Yeah, it’s not terribly reassuring. I mean it wasn’t actually a very positive message. He was just… I don’t think they’ll really kill it and I think people will be okay, but he doesn’t think they have any reason to support it. So that’s not really a great message either.

Stephan: Right. I do agree with his one point about upselling current MySQL customers to Oracle and him thinking that’s tiny money. It is. To get someone that’s using a free and open source product to move to an Oracle solution which can cost lots of money, I think it’s just an unreasonable goal. I just don’t think it’s possible for Oracle to really sell their product to people who already use MySQL.

Brad: They’d probably have better luck pushing them into SQL Server on the Microsoft platform.

Stephan: Yeah, right.

Brad: Oracle is just so expensive. I mean it really is a kind of top-tier database out there and the pricing on it is just out of the ballpark for a lot of players out there. I mean it’s just too expensive.

Stephan:: Yeah, they do have a 1 GB limit if you can keep your databases under 1 GB because they enforce based on size for some products. So if you can keep your product under 1 GB then it’s fairly affordable. But when you think about how things are growing so fast, you know we’re just using so much space now … I don’t think it’s feasible.

Patrick: And Monty’s effort to, in his words, save MySQL, is reflected on HelpMySQL.org. As of this moment, he has 31,046 sign-ups to his online petition.

Well, our next story comes from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, and he reports according to multiple sources that Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will basically be their answer to Facebook Connect. Right now, Twitter has their own sort of authorization, where websites can connect at Twitter and share information, but you have to go through the process of redirecting to Twitter and we’ve all clicked the Allow button a bunch of times. This new product will allow sites to, well, to work like Facebook Connect: to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter. Just like Facebook Connect does, they can stay on your website and you can use the Twitter data and, I would assume, share information from the sites you’re on with Twitter and it’ll be a lot more smooth and seamless.

Brad, you do a lot of web development — are you excited about this development? Does it make you more likely to tie into this Twitter Connect feature, or are you not really even using Facebook Connect right now?

Brad: I think it’s great. I do actually use Facebook Connect a lot. Everyone’s pretty familiar with it now as far as clients that come to us. They know that they want Facebook Connect, they want some kind of Facebook integration and it is completely easy. Just about every software platform out there have some kind of Facebook Connect integration at this point or some kind of plug-in, a module that you can install. They give you that, but I really like the idea. What Twitter is doing is, because I feel like with all the issues Facebook had with privacy and what content’s shared and who’s gained it and this and that, Twitter just seems to make a little more sense as far as kind of being the single sign-on service for a connect type platform like this. It’s just there’s a lot less sensitive information on Twitter. You don’t have all that kind of private data that you might have on Facebook. On Twitter, you really just have your name, your email, your status updates, a little bio and that’s about it. So I think it makes sense. I guess I want to see exactly how the platform works, how easy it is to integrate but I’m pretty excited about it.

Stephan: You know I think it’s easy to integrate with Facebook Connect. What I don’t like about Facebook Connect is the options for the user and how much control you have over it. To me it’s kind of like an on/off switch when I use Facebook Connect. I don’t want, say some Flickr groups to get imported, and I have to change that in the application side rather than the Facebook side. I just wish it was a little easier to use and manage my different things that are using Facebook Connect. If Twitter figures that out and perfects it, then I think that’s awesome.

Brad: You know a big piece that Facebook Connect is missing that everybody wishes it had is it doesn’t share the email address of the user. I’m sure that’s for spam reasons but it will be interesting to see if Twitter keeps that same policy and doesn’t share the email address or using the connect service through Twitter if it would actually share that email with the website that it’s connecting through.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s interesting marketing, isn’t it.

Brad: It would definitely get buzz around it. I mean, you know a lot of people, they want…

Patrick: They would definitely get buzzed. Now, I don’t know if that’s good buzz or bad buzz.

Brad: The social media networks; it’s all about the buzz and who’s talking about you.

Patrick: Yeah, says the German government. But one question is: how many connects do we need, right? Obviously, Twitter and Facebook, these are premier services on the web right now as far as userbase and marketshare of the web itself, but they will have their genesis? They’re maybe not the be-all, end-all, and may go away and their Connect goes away and you know — do we need MySpace Connect? I mean, how many of these boxes do we need? Is it going to become like a refill button on sites where you can just collect all this number of sites they can connect with and share the user data or is there a limit? Do you think Facebook and Twitter are basically the end of this right now or is this something that we’re going to continue to see other services come out with?

Brad: I’m sure it’s not the end of it. I mean, obviously, everybody kind of wants to be that one service that’s kind of the single sign-on. I mean, it’s the same debate. I think we talked about this on the first episode of the SitePoint Podcast.

Patrick: Back in the 50s.

Brad: Yeah, back in the 50s. You know, it will never end because everybody wants to be number one, and there’s always going to be challengers, and this is just another challenger but the nice thing is it’s just so easy. If you hit a site and you see the Facebook Connect button, you know if you click that and then you wait a while, that’s all you have to do and you’re already logged in and you already have an account. I mean it just makes it so easy to register an account on a site, whereas there are a lot of sites that I probably wouldn’t register on. I wouldn’t register a brand new account on some of these sites but if there’s a connect button, I’m more apt to do that. So I think the more that this grows, the more sites will have some kind of easy connect — whether it be through Facebook or Twitter or whatever. I think it’s a good thing.

Stephan: You know honestly, I don’t see either of the services being the central one that I’ll use. I don’t use my Facebook account enough to use it as my connect for different websites and I probably won’t. I don’t use Twitter enough for that either. So I don’t know that it’s the one and I don’t even know if Google would do that for me. I like the idea, the single sign on but you know, Patrick, we’ve talked about this — before that do we really want it to be that easy and all of our information centrally stored and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Patrick: Right.

Stephan: And so I don’t know. I’m not sold.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean, where I like the API and the information is really for finding friends that are on these other services that I sign up for. I just signed up for Foursquare, and I think Gowalla, is it? I’m not going to use them most likely. I have a cheap page at Go Phone, but I wanted to secure my name and might as well connect with my friends, so I did and that’s a good thing.

Now as far as Facebook Connect, I think it’s just a term. It’s based on preference for what you want to do. I think is Brad’s case, it makes sense. In other cases, some other people may not want to do it because for whatever reason, they want to have their information not all tied into their Facebook account and there are different types of accounts. Like a blog comment: you usually don’t get an account anyway, so, you know, what’s the big deal there? A forum account or something else — another social network — you might want to separate your logins. I mean that’s just me, but I guess we’ll see how far the connect thing goes. I guess it’s a form of marketing in a way too, to be that one — the one great internet company that controls all the user accounts. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Well, our next story comes from Craig Buckler on the SitePoint blog, he writes about the — well, the concerned speculation — the rumour that JetPack would replace Firefox’s XUL extensions, and soon. But according Mozilla, that’s not going to happen. Craig posted a snippet of an interview that he did with Nick Nguyen, Mozilla’s Add-Ons Director, and he said that “JetPack is an experimental platform which is driven by members of the community as well from Mozilla labs.” He goes on to say that they’re trying different things, they’re experimenting. It’s much easier to do that when you have something that you can rely on already like their add-on system they have, and they also released a separate statement in response to the speculation saying that “JetPack tries to make everything about add-ons easier from how they’re developed to how they’re installed and managed. If JetPack becomes just as functional and powerful as the existing system, then we’ll talk about whether migrating all extensions to the new platform makes sense.” They say it’s too early to talk about this right now, and no decision has been made as far as deprecating the existing system. They say that they are at least months away from the point where JetPack can serve as even a viable alternative for writing Firefox extensions.

So I use Firefox. I forget where you guys stand on that, but what do you make of this story in general?

Brad: I think it’s good that they came out and said that. I think most of us kind of knew they were not just going to drop add-ons … that’d be like Apple changing the application platform and then saying “You know what, we’re going to just drop all the apps at the store.” That’s never going to happen. I mean it’s too much of a foundation behind the Firefox browser and it’s one of the main reasons it got so popular, because of these add-ons. And just like the article states, people have really become reliable on many of these add-ons and they won’t switch browsers until there’s a comparable add-on or extension that does the same thing.

So yeah, I think it’s great that they kind of rebuilt it. I mean JetPack, you know, just reading up on it, is going to have a lot of cool features: you don’t have to restart when you install an extension; it’s going to have improved security and performance; and it’s also going to be independent from the browser version. So when the new version of Firefox comes out, you don’t have to wait for that add-on to be upgraded; it’s going to work out of the box.

Long term, it’s going to be great, but I’m sure they’re going to just kind of phase it in and then run them side-by-side, and then once JetPack kind of becomes a dominant player for add-ons, then they’ll look at probably retiring the old system. But that’s not going to be an overnight type thing.

Stephan: I think it’s entirely too early to be speculating on it. I’m just going to throw it out there.

Brad: I like to speculate.

Stephan: Well, I mean, I guess it’s kind of what we’re here to do but I agree with you, Brad, I think that’s eventually what will happen — if they really think JetPack’s successful and it’s really useful, then I think that we’ll see it phased in over a decent amount of time. I don’t think that they’re going to kill off add-ons and throw JetPack out there. I don’t think Mozilla is that inept at managing their product.

Patrick: Alright, so our next story comes via TweetMeme via ReadWriteWeb. There is a survey that’s been released by Josh Bernoff at the Groundswell blog at Forrester.com. Basically they polled US-based online adults and asked them about the social activities online that they participate in — their browsing habits in general, things like reading blogs and online forums all the way up to publishing your own blog and publishing your own web pages, and they divided them into seven unique groups on a ladder. They found that ***17% of adults online did none of the following things. 70% were what they call spectators — they read blogs, they listen to podcasts, they watch video from other users, they read online forums, and read tweets, and so on. 59% are joiners– they maintain a presence on a social networking site and they visit those types of sites as well. 20% were what they call collectors — people that use RSS feeds, vote for websites online and add tags to web pages and photos. 37% fell into the critics category, which they felt was contributing to online forums, editing a wiki, commenting on someone’s blog, and posting ratings and reviews online. 32% are conversationalists — people that post updates to Twitter and update their status on a social networking site. And finally, creators were 24%; those people publish a blog, publish their own web pages, upload video, upload music, and write articles and stories and post them online.

So I found this interesting. Some of the major new sites are latching onto, I guess you could say, like ReadWriteWeb … One of the main stories that many of the major new sites are latching onto is the fact that 33% of people were found to be conversationalists or people that update their status online. So essentially, a third of online adults in the US now update a status on a social networking site or Twitter.

So I know that we all fall into probably most of these categories ourselves here on the show. What do you guys think of the survey?

Stephan: I wish they’d included the crossover in those groups, where conversationalists are also reviewers and things like that.

Patrick: Yeah.

Stephan: Just to see it. I’d be interested in that. But I find it interesting that there a lot more spectators … but I guess it makes sense, a lot more spectators than conversationalists. It’s about double, the number of spectators out there or percentage of spectators.

Patrick: Yeah, I guess you can be both a spectator and a joiner. So it would be interesting to see the overlap there.

Another thing I found interesting was considering to an online forum is in critics not conversationalists, and status is almost exclusively conversationalists. I don’t know; maybe I’m getting caught up on just the heading there, the verbiage of these groups, but it seemed a little odd to me that forums were not part of the conversationalist category.

Stephan: The cool thing is that 24% of these people were creators and that’s a good thing, right? I mean I’d like to see that number grow over time and I couldn’t find an old version of the graph like last year’s but I’d be interested to see how much that number has grown.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m not sure if they had one. Brad?

Brad: I’m curious what the inactives do. I mean they’re not reading reviews, they’re not reading forums, they’re not reading blogs or podcasts, I mean what exactly are they doing online?

Patrick: They go to CNN.com.

Stephan: Buying things on eBay.

Brad: Seventy percent, that’s a big number.

Patrick: Yeah, they could be buying things I guess online stores, that’s one. They buy it online. Maybe they check email, maybe they IM. The IM isn’t represented here at all. So maybe they IM, I don’t know. It’s interesting to consider.

Brad: Yeah, I’m actually shocked by that stat that a third of the users are posting weekly updates. I mean I think it’s really cool. I mean, I’ve been doing it for years, I think we all have but I mean it’s shocking that it’s high. If I would have guessed, maybe half that. I think it just kind of goes to show the way the web is evolving, more people are getting involved with it. So it’s pretty neat.

Patrick: So if 33% of online adults post status updates, then I wonder what represent of American teenagers post status updates.

Stephan: It would have to be a lot — really, really high, now that my mom’s posting status.

Patrick: She probably participated in this survey. She’s in every category!

Alright, now let’s talk about a major story, Our biggest story of the week is about Internet Explorer — the government espionage and all those great things. Brad?

Brad: Google has been hacked. That’s kind of my intro. Basically, Google reported they detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack in their corporate infrastructure which originated in China, which isn’t too surprising itself. Obviously Google is probably a big target for a lot of hackers out there, but what’s interesting about this hack is they’ve actually kind of narrowed it down and realized that the hackers were trying to basically get into Gmail accounts of activists in China. So that kind of raised some red flags on who was actually behind the attack. And actually, it didn’t just affect Google; it actually affected about 20 large companies, Google one of them, Adobe was another one, and a few others.

They exploited a vulnerability that existed in every version of Internet Explorer, so IE 6, 7, and 8 were all affected and now there’s a kind of backlash because of that. A few European governments have actually released official statements advising their web users that they need to find an alternative browser until Internet Explorer is patched. And as of recording this, Microsoft has not released a patch so that exploit still exists or that vulnerability still exists in the browser. So the governments are stepping in and telling the users to get off of Internet Explorer until that fix has come into place.

Stephan: I think it’s a sad day if it’s true that the Chinese are doing this to get back at Google in their statements, in their position on the great firewall. I think that it speaks even more poorly about that country’s take on human rights and freedom of speech. If we can get to the bottom of it, if we actually get solid answers on what’s going on, then I think we can make definitive statements about the Chinese government but until then … There’s an article in the New York Times about this, talking about how the code that was debugged had some patterns, and what they thought was an Easter egg may have actually been put in — that this Trojan horse was actually created by someone who wanted to make it look like the Chinese government. I’m really interested in knowing if that’s true.

Patrick: You know, I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, there are a few different storylines here. Obviously, there is the China-Google storyline, there’s the IE storyline, there’s the governments and how Germany advised users to stop using Internet Explorer in, I guess, in any capacity — IE 6, 7, or 8 and I don’t know. I understand the suggestion or the advisory to tell people to stop using something that is vulnerable and find something else. Now, I don’t know what type of warning that they put out or how concrete this sort of thing is usually taken by the Germany people. I mean, maybe this is just bureaucracy or whatever but it does seem strange to me just because of software by its very nature, it gets vulnerabilities. I guess you could say IE is still influential and still widely used that maybe it’s worth it because it could be cataclysmic but it seems strange for the government to come out and say something about computer software like this where it doesn’t seem to happen that often. Maybe it happens more than I know but I don’t know how I feel about that. Any thoughts on that?

Brad: Yeah. I mean, it’s different. I can’t think of any time where the US government has come out and said don’t use this browser, there’s a hole in it. I mean I don’t think that ever happened. I don’t know if it ever would unless it was so bad that no matter what site you hit, you’re going to get infected. But even to get exploited, you still have to hit a malicious site. So just going to your regular websites, you’re not going to be hacked. So you still have to kind of be out there surfing around on some bad sites for this to happen. But yeah, it is different. Obviously, Europe is different to the US.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean we’ve all used software and scripts that have vulnerabilities in it. You know PCB has a history of that sort of thing. WordPress has had plenty of vulnerabilities. Maybe the browser is such a cornerstone of the computing environment and it’s so important that maybe it is necessary for governments to issue a warning. So Microsoft is working to patch this, and they’ve done an out of bond/band patch in an attempt to fix it. So I guess we’ll see what happens and it’s just more trouble for IE and that always leads to more material our podcast. So here it is.

Alright, so at the start of this episode I mentioned that we would have a winner for our iTunes Review giveaway mentioned in episode 43. The winner is VM Tech. VM Tech, thank you for the review. We really appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who reviewed the podcast. To collect your prize, VM Tech, please email podcast@sitepoint.com. You’ll be able to choose a SitePoint PDF book and we hope you enjoy it.

Brad: My host spotlight is a little blast from the past and it’s actually a little program called ICQ. You guys both familiar with ICQ?

Patrick: I haven’t installed it.

Brad: They’ve actually released a new version, ICQ 7, which just came out and actually it still has the messaging component just like it used to, but it also has a social layer to it. So it integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube — all the standards — and it makes it easy to kind of share pictures and links with your friends through the different networks. So it’s pretty cool. Definitely check it out.

A little bit of trivia – do you guys remember when ICQ was originally released?

Patrick: Patrick runs to Google.

Brad: No Google, no Wiki.

Stephan: I guess it was today, 20 years ago or something?

Patrick: I have no idea. I know now because I looked it up but I wouldn’t have otherwise known.

Brad: 1990. No, it was actually — no guesses?

Patrick: Not a guess in good faith.

Brad: It was actually November 1996. So it was a while ago. I remember signing up back in the day — I still have ICQ, I actually don’t use it anymore but the new version is definitely a step up. It has kind of caught up with the times, so it’s definitely worth a second look. You can head to ICQ.com.

Patrick: I actually don’t have it installed, so I might have to take a look at it and, for nostalgic reasons at least, reinstall it and give it a little hard drive space.

Brad: I’m excisted to hear that “uh-oh” new message sound.

Patrick: Out of curiosity, is it something that you keep open like your other clients?

Brad: Oh, I didn’t say I’m running it.

Patrick: Okay. Everybody else, do it first, test it out, and get back to that.

Brad: Let me know how it goes.

Patrick: Yeah, WebDevStudios.com, drop him an email, let him know. So, Stephan?

Stephan: Yeah. This is a comic that I found. It’s how to tell people that they’re wrong or how to tell someone that they’re wrong. It’s for those disagreements you have with people when they just say really dumb things and you’ve gotta come up with a way, and it’s a really funny take on it. So it’s on BasicInstructions.net and I’ll share the link in the notes.

Brad: You sir, are wrong.

Patrick: So what’s the tip then? How should we tell people they’re wrong?

Stephan: Well, they’ve got four steps. You then look to see if you’re dealing with an open-minded person — if you can’t see any reasons for the other person’s position, you have to ask them and make a point that that stuff didn’t occur to you, and then once you understand the logic, you have to explain logically again why they’re wrong.

Patrick: And I’m sure it’s funny when you’re reading the comic.

Stephan: It is. Yeah, see I can’t explain it.

Patrick: Yeah. I understand. You don’t want ruin it.

Stephan: Exactly. Yeah, we just cut this part out of the show.

Patrick: Now it’s staying. Alright, so my spotlight is an article by Jay Baer at ConvinceandConvert.com. It’s called Attacking the Social Media Lynch Mob and in the article Jay talks about just some articles recently that have come out. It’s been a popular topic in this small social media space to criticize anyone who calls themselves a “social media expert” and all of these people popping up who proclaim that they had no social media. Jay takes a different perspective, saying that everything will work out at the end — people who don’t have that much experience, in the end, it will all even out — clients will find out who to work with, who the better consultants are, and so on and so forth. Who are we to criticize someone else who may not know as much in a medium that is really pretty young. So I thought it was a really good read and if you have any interest in the subject, definitely check it out. Jay is a smart guy and a good writer.

So, let’s do our host sign offs guys.

Brad: Sure. I’m Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Seagraves and you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves, and my blog is badice.com.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network, ifroggy.com. You can find me on Twitter @ifroggy and you can follow our usual co-host, Kevin Yank @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. You can visit us at http://sitepoint.com/ to leave comments on this show or any show and to subscribe and to receive every show automatically.

Email podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions for us. We’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by the great Carl Longnecker.

Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #14: The Cyberdyne Bill
2. SitePoint Podcast #16: Online Marketing Inside Out
3. SitePoint Podcast #15: This Way Up

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: January 15th, 2010. A panel of experts considers the latest clashes within the HTML5 working group. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast number 44: HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess.

Today I am joined by a number of prominent voices in the web standards community. We’ve got Bruce Lawson, who’s a web standards evangelist with Opera Software Developer Relations.

Bruce: Hi Kevin.

Kevin: Hi there. You’re one of six authors collaborating on html5doctor.com, is that right?

Bruce: Six and counting, yeah.

Kevin: Six and counting, it’s like a Q&A site focusing on HTML5, answering people’s questions, demystifying the process. Is that fair to say?

Bruce: It is yeah. It’s because specs aren’t written for web authors, specs are written for great gurus, so we’re trying to do the translation.

Kevin: Good. And it is not a medical advice site.

Bruce: (Laughing) No, no, no, definitely not.

Kevin: I am also joined by Ian Lloyd who is the author of SitePoint’s book for beginning web developers, Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML and CSS. The second edition is out now.

Kevin: Hi Ian.

Ian: Hello.

Kevin: Ian is also the author of SitePoint’s The Ultimate HTML Reference and the online version of that was just recently updated with the latest browser support information and that is available for free online at reference.sitepoint.com.

And finally today, we have Kyle Weems who is CSSquirrel—or is that pronounced CSS-squirrel?

Kyle: Just CSSquirrel, which is a number of huge confusions with people, yes.

Kevin: C-S-S-Q-U-I-R-R-E-L on Twitter and the site is cssquirrel.com. Kyle is a standards minded web designer, web standards commentator and creator of the always biting CSSquirrel web comic.

Kyle, your comic this week, The HTML5 Show is sort of the impetus for me for putting together this podcast, so welcome.

Kyle: Oh, thank you.

Kevin: So as I said, this is a timely podcast. In the past week, the web standards community has been consumed by this … I guess you could call it a scandal. On today’s show we’ll be focusing on this huge issue that seems to have pre-occupied every web developer I know this week and that’s Conan O’Brien threatening to leave the Tonight Show.

Kyle: (Laughing)

Bruce: Who?

Kevin: (Laughing) I think Kyle may only be the only one who got that one as a US participant, apologies to the Brits on board today.

Ian: Yeah, all we want to talk about at the moment is the snow.

Kevin: Snow and more snow up there. Is it true that your country is entirely white this week?

Bruce: Absolutely true.

Ian: Well it was a few days ago, there was an absolute awesome photo that the NASA satellite had taken of us completely covered, so it just feels like it’s never ending and it’s only been a week. We’re a bunch of wimps.

Kevin: Making your way around the tunnels underneath the snow, I understand.

Ian: Absolutely.

Kevin: But seriously, last week’s podcast here at SitePoint, we touched on HTML5 and somebody experiments that developers are trying to play with this spec that is still very much under development. But in the past week, we’ve had fresh controversy erupt from within the W3C HTML5 working group both from within and without—and that’s part of the problem—so I wanted to tackle that on today’s show. I’m trying to paint a picture of what that is, what it means, whether we should be concerned. The development process of the HTML5 spec has been tumultuous from the beginning I guess it’s fair to say. Certainly Kyle here has made a brisk trade of drawing comics about the clashes of personality and opinion that have come about. Bruce for those who don’t follow HTML5 closely, can you give us a rough idea of where that spec is at?

Bruce: Who-hoo-hoo… Yep. First of all, let’s go back to how it began.

Kevin: Sure.

Bruce: Because if we start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start.

Kevin: You can’t understand how it got to where it is now without understanding the mess that it sprang from.

Bruce: Indeed. I think 2001 or 2002, the W3C put the finishing touches on HTML4 with a point revision called HTML4.01 and then announced that they were abandoning work on HTML because the future was XML, they said. Many believed them, and I did personally, but then they kind of went off and dreamed up this crazy thing called XHTML2 which was a spec—I’ve described it before as a spec of fantastic and beautiful, philosophical purity that had no relevance at all to the real world. It had no relevance to what the browser manufacturers were doing and little relevance to what authors wanted to do and it broke backwards compatibility so severely that at one point it even depreciated the <img> tag. They brought that back but that’s where they were going.

And so a group of people who worked for browser manufacturers—it started at Opera for whom I work but we were soon joined by people in Mozilla and then Apple—started writing in their own personal time a guerilla spec called WHATWG. I think that stands for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. They called this spec Web Applications 1.0 because it was a spec designed to extend HTML so that it would work for web apps, you know things like Yahoo! Mail and Google Maps and Google Docs and Picnik, the photo editing software, websites that are applications rather than static documents. They were doing this stuff in their own time and then Tim Berners-Lee said “We made a mistake at the W3C and we want to go and reach out and re-start work on HTML”, and a vote was taken and they decide to ask the WHATWG if they could use their spec as the basis for what’s being called HTML5.

So HTML5 is a word dreamed up by the W3C and the WHATWG called it Web Applications 1.0 and the specs have been developed by the two groups at once. So it’s been developed by the W3C and by the original custodians, the WHATWG and it’s entirely fair to say there’s been quite considerable culture clashes between those two groups which has kind of come to a head now but the last week’s shenanigans and not really any worse than what we’ve seen before and we’ll see them again, in my opinion.

Kevin: So what was on paper a great reconciliation—or at least we hoped it was a push in that direction—it hasn’t really panned out that way. Is that fair? I mean it still seems to be two groups in a lose association.

Bruce: Absolutely. I don’t know that there ever was any great reconciliation. So for example when the W3C decided to end work on XHTML2 even though it wasn’t complete, they did so because they were kind of acknowledging that the WHATWG had it correctly and there were certainly some members of the WHATWG who were being, in my opinion, unnecessarily triumphalist, if you like, and kind of almost crowing about this victory over the W3C.

I work for Opera and we’re sitting on lots of W3C committees. I sit on a working group myself, I’m a web standers evangelist. I’ve got lots of time for the W3C but it’s fair to say that W3C took— they really dropped the ball with HTML and it needed the WHAT Working Group to give them a good kick at the backside to make them realize that HTML wasn’t dead and can’t die and it can’t break backwards compatibility but there was never a reconciliation. It’s always been a very uneasy meeting when the WHATWG and the W3C come together.

Kevin: So that brings us to this week, you said the shenanigans this week were no worse than what we’ve seen before but— Well Kyle, your comic this week, The HTML5 Show paints a picture of the whole process having degenerated into something akin to the Muppet Show. From your perspective, are things getting worse or better?

Kyle: I think they’re a little better today than they were when I first made it.

Kevin: Okay.

Kyle: But that said, I don’t think it’s going to stay that way. I think it’s going to continue to break down as a process.

Kevin: So what’s going on exactly?

Kyle: I mean, you have these two organizations as it’s been said with very different philosophies and what to do about the spec and it kind of feels to me like the WHATWG doesn’t really think of HTML5 as HTML5 anymore. Under Ian Hickson, the editor, they’re kind of moving forward. They have made their last call on this. They’re ready to continue to add things to a “versionless” HTML. Meanwhile the W3C which hasn’t hit last call with the spec is still trying to solve what are the targets are for HTML5, specifically.

Kevin: Right.

Kyle: And when they’ve made decisions via contributions of a large amount of people regarding what should be in the spec, what shouldn’t be in the spec. There’s been some pretty severe disagreements at least from what I’m viewing from people like Ian, and since basically he’s the editor-in-chief as it were, if he disagrees with that he’s chosen that, ”Well, it’s still in the spec but you guys cannot have it in yours over there if it makes you feel good.” I mean it’s still moving on. It sounds like there’s a breakdown of communication where it’s like even if they do understand each other there’s no kind of like closing the gap to make nice anymore. At least that’s how it feels to me from watching the various mailing lists and chat logs and whatnot.

Kevin: It’s a bizarre situation that we say there are these two camps, there’s the WHAT Working Group and there is the W3C working group, but in fact Ian Hickson is the appointed leader of both those groups.

Bruce: Yes, although he co-edits— The W3C spec, is co-edited with Dave Hyatt of Apple, I believe.

Kevin: Right.

Bruce: Although I think Ian is the sole editor of the WHATWG side. Although I’ll be frank, my interest is primarily the tech and not so much the politics because I don’t understand politics very well and it’s a full time job just following the politics.

Kevin: Well Ian, as someone who regularly writes for beginning web developers and people actually getting work done as opposed to people obsessing about politics. What effect does the tone of the debate that we’re seeing here have on your approach to HTML5?

Ian: Well, if Bruce says he’s not sort of following the politics then I’m completely in the dark because I’ve kind of made a slight conscious effort really to sort of steer away from the very fine details of HTML5. I definitely have an interest in it, I definitely have an interest in it from a point of view that I have an interest in doing anything I do right and following the standards but I’ve tried not to get too bulked down in fine details because I know it’s something that’s always shifting. I’m just really, really looking forward to the day when I can actually pick up a book that has everything in it and I can trust it and rely on it and that’s ultimately when I’m going to really start to kind of throw myself right in with HTML5.

From my point of view, I’m in this situation at the moment at the place where I work, where I’m trying to put together some standards for projects that will not see the light of day for probably a couple of years and what we’re talking about here is something that will have a web front end but it’s part of a much, much bigger project. So I’m faced with this situation where I’m trying to define some standards, not knowing where we’re going to be in two years’ time and knowing what can I safely say now. What can I say is the standard that we want to go with? And when I say standard I mean sort of an internally documented set of recommendations rather than sort of a proper standard if you catch my drift.

And so this has been the problem I’ve had with HTML5. What can I say now that is going to be safe? And every time I hear about HTML5, it’s not because I’m watching any of the IRC logs or anything like that because I don’t. The only time I ever really hear what’s going on with HTML5 is through Twitter and unfortunately, most of what I get to hear from Twitter is the moaning and the bitching which was obviously what’s happened in the last week. It’s been really interesting and funnily enough that the page that I really found out what was going on with regards to the most recent shenanigans was what Kyle wrote.

Couple of days ago, Dave Shae on Twitter, he was really looking for someone to summarize what all this was about and so it’s good to finally find out what the shenanigans were about but I don’t think I really fully understand the politics and I probably don’t actually want to.

Kevin: Right. We certainly see a lot of, sort of— I see a lot of useful summaries coming out of the WHAT Working Group. They like to post things like weekly summaries of what they’re working on. But that as we’re seeing, they are turning their focus towards the future. It’s like they— I don’t want to be unfair, but it seems to me like that WHAT Working Group, what they’re interested in is blazing the trail, setting a direction for the next thing and working out all the details about how the last thing that they created is going to form a coherent standard, isn’t as much of interest to them.

Bruce: Don’t forget Kevin that a lot of what we can call HTML5 was actually about documenting the actual reality that had never been written down before, so part of the effort for HTML5 was the first ever specification that documented XMLHTTPRerequest which Microsoft invented and we all use every day with Ajax and nobody ever written it down, things like Canvas which Apple invented and everybody reversed engineered into the different browsers was specified, things like ContentEditable, which was a Microsoft invention was specified because all the different browsers had implemented it. So a lot of what they did actually documented and specified and codified what we already have been using for a long time. There are definitely fantastic new ideas in the HTML5 spec as well but it’s not as if they’re just dreaming up new stuff and running on. I think they think that a lot of things they’ve done has been writing down what we currently use and now they’ve got that foundation there, they can start to move on. Again, I’m not part of that group. This is my personal take from outside that group.

Kevin: Go ahead, Ian.

Ian: Sorry, I was just going to say that there’s a nice little phrase they always use for that, isn’t there Bruce? The “paving the cow paths”.

Bruce: Indeed.

Ian: I believe that’s what’s always put forward.

Bruce: Yeah, that’s the essential philosophical and practical difference between HTML5 and XHTML2. HTML5 said for better or for worse, this is where we are. Let’s document it, let’s codify it, let’s standardize it so if somebody else wants to make a browser tomorrow, it’s all written down for them. Everything could be interoperable and then let’s build on where we are rather than go off into a fantasy world in which XML rules the world and we can design the Web from scratch and break backwards compatibility because there’s umpty-nine squillion web pages out there and we can’t afford for them to break. We need them to continue working so we are where we are.

Kevin: So thinking about Ian’s effort to sort of set his own company’s standards for what they’ll be building in a couple of years’ time. Bruce as the official standards body representative here today, it sounds like you’re advice would be to ignore the noise and the grand plans of people like the WHAT Working Group and focus on the serious standards that are being built at the W3C right now. That’s the stable core that you can focus on if you need something to hold on to.

Bruce: Yes. First, let me say I’m not representing any standards body. I work for Opera but I’m not part of the team that’s writing the HTML5 spec. My interest is as a developer, I came from a developer background.

Kevin: I will call you the defender in spirit of web standards, then.

Bruce: Okay, okay. I’m one of the WaSP, but I’m not a W3C guy, nor a WHATWG.

Kevin: Sure.

Bruce: Yes, if you look at the WHATWG version of the spec on WHATWG.org, you’ll see handy little status bars against each element or section that tells you where implementation is in the browsers and some things like Canvas are excellently implemented across four of the five big browsers, other things like ContentEditable, you can use across the board. Other stuff, like Web Sockets, aren’t implemented anywhere and so it would be folly to…

Ian: Microdata.

Bruce: Microdata. …it would be folly to suggest those as an internal standard but it’s not difficult to go through and work out which parts of the specs are close to real world or actually just merely document what we’ve all been using for ages. About the noise, I mean Ian mentioned that he was following a lot of stuff on Twitter. I think there is… We live in a noisier environment than we did when HTML4 was being written because we can all Twitter intimate thoughts 900 times a day like I do but also I think it’s naïve of people to assume that there is more politics now than there used to be. The thing is with the W3C, it was always a member organization in which people sat down in smoky rooms and argued with each other and arm wrestled and smiled while they kicked each other in the balls in hotels, face to faces.

What we’ve got now with the WHATWG is they started off a process in which anybody can join and anybody can comment and Ian Hickson has always said he doesn’t care where a good idea comes from. It can be from a W3C member group or it can be from an individual in Bangalore or Berlin or Birmingham. It can be posted on IRC or Twitter or a blog post. If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea. So I think the extra noise and the idea that there’s more politics is actually a function of a) our Twitterized society, and also b) the fact that there’s just a hugely open process whereby bickering happens out in the open rather than in Silicon Valley hotel lobbies.

Kevin: Having spoken to people who’ve been on W3C working groups before, when they did this closed version of the process, it definitely seems like the new HTML way of doing things, if nothing else, is better for the mental health of the people involved in the debates. But from your point of view, is this openness damaging the spec in the eyes of the greater web community?

Bruce: In my personal opinion, if there is damage in the wider community, it’s very transient and it leads to a vastly superior spec in the long term. That’s my personal perspective. I don’t know what the other guys feel.

Kevin: Would you go along with that, Ian?

Ian: It depends what day it is you ask me really. I mean some days I’ll be very enthusiastic about what I can actually implement with HTML5 and what’s safe to use now and then other days you do have these kinds of flaming arguments that go on and make me think, (sigh) “Why do we bother?”

Kevin: What I’m wondering is would you rather hear all of this noise and take it or leave it or do you prefer the way things used to be that we just got these nice well-considered, well-worded specs for us to consider as a whole in draft form and submit feedback to in a civilized way. Is it nice to know what they’re arguing about or just that they are arguing on our behalf?

Ian: I think overall, it’s probably a good thing that we are hearing what the arguments are about, I mean you could always say use the expression “ignorance is bliss” if someone puts something in front of you and says this is how it should go, you say, “Oh, I’ll accept that. That’s fine.” But then if you have a problem with it then it’s just too late to do anything about it. So it’s good that people are having these arguments or discussions about where it’s right and where it’s going right and where it’s going wrong. If we cast our minds back to what was happening with the accessibility guidelines with the WCAG2 and that went through absolutely massive, massive changes and it wouldn’t have ended up being the documentation that it is now had they not been the almighty storm that was kicked off about it. And so when this happens with the HTML5, you got to think well, there are a few bumps in the road but ultimately it’s got to be good for the final result.

Kevin: Yeah. I know Kyle, you must be all for this public process. You wouldn’t have anything to draw comics about otherwise.

Kyle: Right, I’d still be trying to make up more jokes about Opera if HTML wasn’t so noisy – and no offense, Bruce. I think process is a good thing because in addition, it has given me something to draw every week. Yeah, it does give in theory everybody a say in what’s going on around them since HTML5 or versionless HTML or whatever we’re going to end up calling it—Frank, we could call it Frank if we like—is going to be used probably for several years if not way past what I would think a technology should last with billions of web pages. So you know if we don’t get our say in now, then naturally we’ll just be complaining farther down the road.

I’d say the only part about it that sometimes disturbs me personally and the reason I end up drawing these angry squirrel comics is when you have the appearance of the public process and then when there’s decisions made by the majority, then you’ll have like—I love to pick on them but—Ian Hickson, the editor will then say, “Okay, we’ve had the process. The process has gone through. I’ve decided that I’m going to do it this way anyway.” and that kind of hurt me when that happens because then the process is an illusion and it’s kind of shown for what it is and then it’s like well, what does it matter what we think?

Kevin: So in that sense your comics would be a peaceful form of protest?

Kyle: Absolutely. Maybe it’s just a principle because often HTML5 for what ends up coming out of it has been good so far so regardless of the process, it might be a good product but if you’re going to have a process I’d prefer it’s at least honest.

Bruce: I think Kyle’s hit upon something really interesting there because although I’ve been talking about an open process, it’s true or it’s my perception that the WHATWG and Ian Hickson run a kind of open source process whereby Hicksy’s a benevolent dictator for life and the W3C run a process which seeks consensus. And Hicksy’s on record is saying he doesn’t seek consensus. He will weigh up all the evidence given to him, regardless of where it comes from or what form it comes in, but ultimately he will take a decision because he thinks that you can’t have a consensus based approach when you’re looking at a thousand plus participants in a working group. I can’t comment, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have to process the tub thumping and the ranting of a thousand people like me on email everyday but it’s true I think what Kyle says that there isn’t a consensus seeking approach. Openly it’s not a consensus seeking approach, it’s, “I’ve listened to you all and this is what I’ve decided.” from Ian.

Kyle said something interesting which was that the spec will probably last a long time, longer than maybe a technology should but I think that HTML5 has already prolonged the life of HTML because things like Flash and things like Microsoft Silverlight were snapping at HTML’s heels as the way to build web applications simply because it was too difficult or clumsy or clunky to do them in HTML and JavaScript. So I think the HTML5 process is already a victory for those of us who believe that they Web should be an open standard because it’s making the tools we all use more suitable for the things we need to build and hopefully, therefore, prolonging the life of open standards for the web which I believe passionately in.

Kevin: It seems like we have three levels of openness that are possible here if we divide it into strata. You have the closed technologies like Flash—as the perpetual whipping boy here—but Flash developed by one company and released as a published spec but just one company’s opinion of how things should be. Then we have the direction we see being taken by HTML5 where everyone gets a say but what ends up being decided on and published, it seems, comes down to what one person is convinced of by everyone getting a say, rather than the consensus that the W3C would hope to achieve in it’s typical standards process. And then finally we have this ideal of consensus whatever that means on any given day, whether it’s you get 75% of people in the working group voting the same way, you call that consensus and too bad if you’re in the other 25%. So it sounds like HTML5 is a middle ground. It’s open enough and everyone is getting their say and that makes it better than what we might otherwise be stuck with, but it’s not quite the ideal we might hope it could be.

Kyle, do you want to take that?

Kyle: Uh, sure. It kinda sounds like the wild west, now, you know? Uh, we should name HTML5 after it. But yeah, I mean one thing that Bruce said that I have to agree with completely is the bit about plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight, as a person who works with code everyday and as someone who’s gotten more aware of accessibility and you look at those plug-ins and it just creates this huge, obnoxious kind of glut that appears in a web page that’s hard to work with or do things with and of course are owned by the various companies that made them. So they decide how those work individually. I love the fact that with HTML, it’s an open standard for everyone and it’s also with HTML5 doing more things that developers do. Ian just, if we could let him jump in, but he just wrote a point about this Canvas-level accessibility and that’s a good one.

Ian: Yeah, I mean you mentioned obviously with Flash, and that Flash is, depending on who you give it to it can be incredibly inaccessible or it can be very accessible but finding a developer who can do a really, really good job with a Flash movie or application, it’s not easy to get someone who can do that. But from my understanding, my little understanding of what Canvas can do in terms of accessibility that is actually presenting a big hurdle at the moment so it may be using open technologies but it comes with its own baggage. Would that be fair to say, Bruce?

Bruce: It would, yeah. I think the reason for that is that Canvas is a proprietary Apple invention they invented for their dashboard that was retrospectively codified as a spec. So no implementation of it is yet accessible but I do know that a couple of the guys I work with in Opera are interested in making Canvas accessible and I introduced them to the guys whose job it was in Adobe, or Macromedia as it was, to retrospectively make Flash 5 accessible, and they have been talking. And this gives me an opportunity as well to say that I don’t want to engage or I don’t want to be able to think I’m engaging in Flash bashing here. Flash is a cool technology.

Somebody said to me when I spoke at a conference last year, something that struck me as really profound and I’ve been looking for a reference for it, and this guy told me that this was research done on the top 100 companies in the world in the year 1900 and only three of them were still around in the year 2000. And I thought it doesn’t matter how good any one company is, if the Web’s going to last, it can’t be entrusted to any company, no matter how benevolent that might be because you just never know if that company is going to be around, and wouldn’t it be appalling if all of the history and all of the stuff that we built on the Web disappeared into the ether because one company went under. So that’s why I’m convinced that it should be an open standard not because I want to bash any one particular corporation just because I think the web is too valuable to be in the hands of any one company.

Kevin: So what then is the distinction between one company Adobe, building Flash and releasing it, as eventually releasing it as a file format that is documented for other people to implement if they see fit versus Apple bringing Canvas to the WHAT Working Group, proposing it there as something that any browser can implement. What’s the distinction because it seems very subtle?

Bruce: It does and the main difference I think is that Canvas for whatever reason, it”s before my time, was copied by the other browsers, it’s native to them so you don’t need a plug-in to use Canvas, whereas with Flash, the browser has to pass the data to a plug-in. So for example if you’re passing off video data to a Flash plug in, it’s a black box. If it crashes, you can’t control it, there’s nothing the browser manufacturer can do whereas with native video, you can manipulate it any which way you choose so there’s nothing in my opinion wrong with Flash as a product. It’s just for historical reasons, it’s a plug-in and Canvas lives natively in four of the five browsers and therefore it’s an open standard.

Ian: You mentioned something today Bruce on Twitter that one of the biggest hurdles that you saw with this kind of rich media was actually the lack of visual IDEs. So with Flash there are tools that have been there for a long time, Silverlight maybe, not everyone’s cup of tea but they’ve worked hard on developing the tools, whether it’s something that you want to use or not. But if you want to create something that’s going to be outputted on Canvas then where do you start?

Bruce: Well it’s interesting because immediately after I Twitted that, I got a Twit back from a guy who actually works for Opera who’s on the SVG working group which is a technology that’s similar but not the same as Canvas and he pointed me to a demo by an Adobe engineer of a guy importing an Illustrator file into Dreamweaver which Dreamweaver then turns into Canvas, which was fascinating and I didn’t know existed. So that’s really encouraging because the blog post that I was pointed to, the Adobe guy that made the point that Adobe doesn’t make the money from distributing the Flash player. Adobe makes its money from selling authoring tools, so if Dreamweaver and Illustrator and the Flash tool can produce Canvas just as easily as it can Flash then of course, there’s still a great incentive for people to part with the money to buy Creative Studio because at the moment you want to write Canvas, you got to write JavaScript and not everybody wants to do that.

Kevin: So bringing this back to HTML5, Kyle through your comics, I think everyone is more than aware of your opinions on the standards process but as far as the actual web development work that you do day to day, what is you approach to HTML5? I mean we’ve heard on this podcast from developers who have started using HTML4 with class names that match HTML5 elements as sort of a forward looking approach to their markup, while other people have actually taken the plunge and started using HTML5 markup despite the difficulties that that entails with today’s browsers. How do you approach it?

Kyle: That’s actually a really good point because it kind of ties into something else about advocacy for HTML5 which I’ll try to bounce back to in a second. I work at Mindfly Website Design Studio so I report to bosses with opinions and whatnot, and so HTML5 can be a tricky sell especially once you start doing the whole <!DOCTYPE html> bit because certain creaky old browsers that haven’t quite left the Internet yet can give you problems, severe problems when you start marking up in it. In particular Internet Explorer 7 and younger, or older, are fairly problematic when it comes to styling elements that didn’t exist when it was made like header and footer and what not.

Kevin: Right.

Kyle: So actually what’s happened is here by and large at the work place, I’m unfortunately still coding in HTML4, XHTML1.1 or whatever you want to call it and doing the class name conventions to kind of mentally prepare myself for things like header and footer and whatnot, and then when I can get away with it when we have a client who wants to take a risk or if there’s a function that HTML5 allows in certain browsers that isn’t a hundred percent vital in others then we’ll go ahead and take that risk and use the HTML5, prepare them for the fact that certain browsers won’t be able to use those features. So from that position, I use it on my personal stuff but when it comes to making things for clients, a lot of times I have to make sure the website works for everybody and so certain features doesn’t work for everybody regardless as opposed to some sort of graduated kind of experience.

Advocating HTML5, not only in the workplace but also in the web development community and then the online community of all web developers and designers, it can be tricky to get people to buy in to taking that risk making sites for clients in exchange for money when they’re not sure about the stability of the spec and I think that’s been the hugest issue with this public process. I mean I’m glad it’s a public process but when it doesn’t appear the groups are getting along, we have an item that’s in the spec, then it’s not in the spec, or you have something that changes in how it functions, these people become really shy at the idea of jumping in and trying to adopt these features and granted it’s a spec in progress so that’s expected but it can make it a hard sell.

Ian: And following up on the idea about advocacy, just to relay a little story about where Bruce and I have, well I wouldn’t say worked together, but what happened was I had a question from a colleague at work and they were asking about implementing video in HTML5 and I started to answer the question and then kind of stopped myself and thought, “You know I’m not really the best person to ask about this.” and I got on to Bruce and said, “Would you be interested in coming down to speaking to our developers here?” In our team, we’ve got a group of about 12 developers who are—well, not all of them are web-standards-savvy but we’ve got a good proportion of people that get it and they would be enthusiastic and would be keen to learn.

Bruce was happy to come down and talk about HTML5, talk about some of the Opera stuff and give us some demos and it was really, really good. We had some real enthusiastic responses to these people and I think Bruce was happy to come along to a company where we’ve got thousands of employees. It’s a big organization but there are people that get it. And we’re starting to make baby, baby steps towards using HTML5 and I mean the tiniest, tiniest little steps. For example, we now use the HTML5 doctype. It was a no-brainer. It was just such a simple little thing to change and I did it as part of a re-burning exercise that we were going through a short while ago.

Going back to what I said earlier in the podcast about trying to define some standards and picking up from what you were saying about using class names that kind of tallied up with the HTML5 standards. One of things that I’ve actually specified in these documentation that I’ve been writing is that we should be using header and footer elements instead of <div class="header">, or <div id="footer"> and on top of that, I’ve also created some little favelets that the testing people can use to test against it so if there’s a presence of a div with an ID that looks like it probably should be an HTML5 equivalent then it will alert it, alert them to it.

So these little things that we started to implement but it’s still a long way off before we get down the road of saying using the video element. I think ultimately, what we’re going to end up with is a real mish-mash of HTML5 doctype, XHTML Syntax, Flash and possibly Canvas. But another problem that we have is you’re talking about older browsers and I guess to come here work for is typical in a lot of companies where – well, we’re still using IE6 and we’re
not going to be off IE6, I know, for probably a good couple of years when we’re going to be jumping at a corporate level, we’re going to upgrading from Windows XP straight to Windows 7 but we’re still talking another two years of IE6 and that can make it very, very problematic as a developer to say, “Well, we want to use HTML5. We can come up with these things.” They look great in the new browsers but the people have got to sign these off are still using the cruddy, old browser from 2001 and that’s probably the biggest challenge that we have in trying to drive HTML5 forward.

Bruce: Aw man, I hear you. As you know Ian, I used to work for the Law Society in England and until 2005, the web team were only allowed to use IE5 to check our work and it was a disciplinary offense to download a different browser. So I understand where you are. And now I’m going to metamorphose into HTML5 Evangelist Man, but the beauty of what they’ve done philosophically is fantastic is it’s so backwardsly compatible. So with the video element you can put fallback between the tags and you can embed a Flash movie if you want to. So a browser that can use a video element will do, whereas a browser that can’t use a video element will just fall back and import the Flash movie and it won’t have necessarily all the loveliness that native video has, but something will show which I think is fab.

If anybody listening wants to look at that, there’s a guy called Kroc Camen, I think it’s C-A-M-E-N, his website’s camendesign.com. If you look at Video for Everyone in your search engine, you’ll find it and he’s got some beautiful code, which validates as HTML5 and yet will show the video in all browsers by using Flash as a backup for IE6, etc. That’s the great thing.

Canvas, it’s a little trickier. The header and the footer elements, Remi Sharp a friend of mine and a fellow HTML5 doctor adds a little bit of JavaScript which will make those stylable in IE5 onwards, I think. It doesn’t work in Netscape 4 because I tried it when I spoke at a conference last year and it was a bit wobbly.

Kevin: Oh gosh, well that rules it out. (laugh)

Bruce: Yeah, I think we can forgive Netscape— not working in Netscape 4.

Kevin: Yeah.

Bruce: I apologize for putting my evangelist hat on, but that’s why I forgive all the politics bull— B.S., because it can do this. They’ve designed it in a way that allows for maximum backwards compatibility and also Ian, it’s not a mismatch if you’re using XHTML syntax and some Canvas and some Flash and an HTML5 doctype, you’re doing what HTML5 was designed to do which was to reflect how real developers in the real world with real customers have to work, which is exactly the same way as we use CSS. You know, we have progressive enhancement and we use things that will work in the modern browsers but will degrade gracefully in those that don’t. This is the way we’ve always worked. There’s nothing to, there’s no need for anybody to feel shamefaced and say it’s a real mismatch. We’ve all been doing that for ages.

Kevin: So it sounds like HTML5, on the surface you see tags like video and you go, “Oh, that’s going to make video so much simpler. It’s just going to be one tag.” But in the short term, it’s one more tag that you wrap around the gobbledygoop of two embedded objects with perhaps conditional comments for Internet Explorer so it adds to the complexity now as an investment in hopefully reducing that complexity in the future.

Bruce: But from a language perspective, it’s very, very simple, there’s no need to wrap it around objects and embeds. From a having to serve IE6 and IE7 and IE8 perspective you have to do that but there’s nothing in the language that’s terribly complex there but at least it has the ability to be backwards compatible. When you compare that with what they were trying to do with XHTML2 you can see why the W3C effort, in my opinion, my personal opinion, was rather in the doldrums and it was so good that the WHATWG came along. (Reciting) This is my personal opinion and it does not reflect the opinion of my employer, etc.

Kevin: Well, it is clear that HTML5, if you eliminate all the noise, if you look through that. It’s a good thing and it will make the web better. Even if they stopped work on it today, it’s already much better than what we’ve had before and I suppose if that weren’t true people like Kyle wouldn’t be so upset when there were signs of the process going off the rails.

Kyle: That would definitely be right. I mean if it wasn’t a good product I probably wouldn’t be paying attention, people wouldn’t come read a comic about an angry squirrel talking about it. Regardless of the process it appears to be to me, there is no denying that I rather enjoy the product. It’s a tough sell right now to some of the shy-er developers out there which is more people than I would’ve imagined but I’m really excited for what can be done with it even today, let alone tomorrow.

Kevin: Well, thank you guys. I think that’s a great place to end and it sounds like we’ve concluded that the future of HTML5, while not smooth but it does at least seem to be safe for now. So thanks again Bruce Lawson, Ian Lloyd and Kyle Weems for joining us today.

Bruce: Thank you.

Ian: Thanks guys.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch.

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom.

Have any thoughts about this interview? Please visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have any questions for us; we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening and have a happy, healthy, and successful 2010.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

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Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #33: Team Opera at WDS09
2. SitePoint Podcast #6: What to do about Internet Explorer 6

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Google Chrome Overtakes Safari Market Share

• Chrome Beat Safari in December (TUAW)
• SitePoint Podcast #40

Experimenting with HTML5 in the Real World

• A Real-World Case Study On HTML5 (Newism)
• A Form of Torture (Dive Into HTML5)
• 99designs

MySQL in Danger of Acquisition by Oracle

• Sign Up to Save MySQL? (SitePoint)
• Oracle Makes Commitments to Customers, Developers and Users of MySQL (Oracle)
• Save MySQL!
• Helpmysql.org campaign delivers first 14.000 signatures to competition authorities (Save MySQL!)
• Help keep the Internet free (Monty Says)

Blippy

• Introducing Blippy, the Shopaholic Social Network! (SitePoint)
• Blippy
• MacBreak Weekly #173 (TWiT)
• Withings Wi-Fi Scale (Withings)

Host Spotlights:

• Patrick: The Top 10 Copyright Stories of the 2000s (Plagiarism Today)
• Stephan: MagicPrefs
• Kevin: InstaPaper (also PHP Advent and 24 ways)

Show Transcript

Kevin: January 8, 2010. Chrome overtakes Safari, MySQL is at risk, and is now the time to try HTML5? I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #43: Passive Over-sharing.

And welcome to the first news episode of the SitePoint Podcast for 2010. We had our interview with @garyvee last week, which was actually recorded before the New Year but it was a great way to ring in the New Year, Patrick, thanks for doing that.

Patrick: Thanks, Kevin and thanks for ruining the surprise about it being recorded in 2009. They had no idea.

Kevin: (laugh) I don’t think anyone thought that you were up on New Year’s Day recording a podcast with Gary Vaynerchuk.

Kevin: You’re a dedicated guy, but I don’t expect that from you.

Patrick: Okay, thank you.

Kevin: We have Patrick O’Keefe with us today, resident Froggy at the iFroggy Network, which celebrated its 10 year anniversary this week?

Patrick: Yes, thank you for mentioning that, Kevin. I’m totally surprised. I’m totally surprised. No, I appreciate that. Yeah, it was 10 years since I registered the name which was on January 1, 2000 – Y2K. So after all the computers kind of blinked off and crashed, I was registering a domain name.

Kevin: Well, yeah, geez, 10 years, it goes by fast.

Patrick: Yeah.

Kevin: We also have Stephan Segraves with us today, recovering programmer from Houston, Texas.

Stephan, I understand the less said about what you’re doing, the better?

Stephan: Yes.

Kevin: Well, fair enough.

Let’s dive right in with our first story which is Google Chrome beating Safari’s market share in December. We spoke about Google Chrome in podcast #40, I think it was, last time we mentioned it and that’s when they brought out Chrome beta for Mac. It seems like it’s done them some good.

Stephan: Yeah, I think it is. I mean it’s a good browser, it’s fast and the version for Mac is pretty stable and I haven’t had really any real issues. There is one quirk – the bookmarks. I can’t delete bookmarks. There’s no bookmarks manager.

Kevin: Yeah, there’s no bookmark manager.

Stephan: That irritates me.

Kevin: That qualifies as alpha software for me. For beta, you got to at least be able to delete the things that you can create with the app.

Stephan: Yeah, I know and I didn’t realize it until I had imported all my Safari bookmarks. I’m like aawww man, because I didn’t want them all.

Kevin: So are you working on Google Chrome as your primary browser right now?

Stephan: I’m kind of using it as secondary, just playing with it. I still like Safari as my primary.

Kevin: Well, I presume if you really waned to get rid of your bookmarks, you could go in and delete the bookmark file or something like that…. Something hacky.

Stephan: Yeah, but I’m not going to worry about it you know. I’d just rather play around with it and it’s fun to play around with because it’s so fast. I mean it’s really fast. I like it.

Kevin: So Safari tried the same trick and I had to look this up because I couldn’t really believe it but mid-2007 is when Safari for Windows was first announced as a beta at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. So it’s been 2½ years since we’ve had Safari for Windows but just by releasing a version for a new platform, the Mac, Chrome has jumped, leapfrogged Safari’s market share. I don’t know.

What’s the lesson here? Is Apple wasting its time developing a browser?

Stephan: I think it’s just the Google name. That’s all.

I mean, I think there’s a place for it but I still think that Safari is a great browser. Firefox is a great browser. So I don’t know. I guess I don’t understand the jump. Maybe it’s a lot of people bandwagon jumpers you know, “Let’s try it out,” and who knows.

Kevin: Are you still wrestling with Firefox, Patrick?

Patrick: Yeah, I use Firefox primarily, actually, really exclusively and I haven’t really even tried Chrome, I don’t think… maybe since the first hoopla about it way back when but now I just had no reason.

Stephan: I will say that I use Chrome primarily at work, like it’s my primarily browser at work.

Kevin: Really?

Stephan: Yeah, on Windows and Safari is my backup on Windows.

Kevin: On Windows? Wow, you must be one of the few Safari users on Windows.

Stephan: I just like how lightweight it is. I don’t have a great computer at work.

Kevin: Yeah. I’m a Safari user as well but I find that Safari is the browser that still has the most compatibility issues. I mean maybe Opera would have a lot of compatibility issues if I used that.

Stephan: With like with what though? Like what?

Kevin: Just things… mainly web applications, things that use JavaScript that aren’t as well-maintained as others. I mean, as much as we like Libsyn that we use to host this podcast but their web interface for looking at statistics about our podcast listeners isn’t quite compatible with Safari. It broke when Safari 4 came out and they’ve never gotten around of fixing it and it just seems like Safari, because of its small market share, is a second class browser in a lot of developers’ eyes. It doesn’t get the level of testing and the level of immediate fixes with new releases as other browsers do. So Firefox tends to be the browser that I open up either for developing because I’m more familiar with its developer tools or to overcome issues like this.

I find certain sites download files in a hinky way that Safari doesn’t quite support. I end up getting files downloaded as the filename of the script that generated them rather than the actual filename that I’m expecting, whereas Firefox works properly. And again, I’m sure that’s just a subtle coding issue that they haven’t tested for just because Safari isn’t on their radar the way Firefox is.

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, I can understand that.

Kevin: Well, hopefully, Apple finds a way to make their browser – I don’t want to say relevant because it is still the default browser for Mac users, but it’s surprising. Mac is garnering some great market share and yet the default browser on the Mac isn’t as much. So a lot of Mac users must, as their first step, install something like Firefox.

Stephan: Which I find kind of interesting because – I mean Safari is a good browser right out of the box. I guess I don’t understand why people would want to go and – I mean, unless that they’re using websites that it automatically always breaks and the only websites I’ve had issues with on the Mac are things that are Microsoft generated usually.

The Safari breaks like on Outlook for the Web or whatever it’s called, it breaks it and can’t use it. So things like that annoy me but other than that, Safari seems to get the job done for the most part.

Kevin: HTML5 in the real world. Have either of you done any experimentation with HTML5 at all?

Stephan: I haven’t touched it yet. I was reading through the forums. There’s a tutorial out there on forms. I can’t remember who wrote it but I was reading through that, and it looks like it’s pretty verbose. I like that.

Kevin: Yeah, this is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 book?

Stephan: Yes, yes, that’s the one. Yes.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s good. We’ll have to put a link to that.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s good.

Kevin: This blog post from Australian web design from Newism documents their experience actually using HTML5 for the first time. For the first time. There’s a lot of people out there talking a lot about HTML5 and arguing point and counterpoint on the little details of the spec but there’s one big stumbling block when it comes to actually using HTML5 and that’s that Internet Explorer doesn’t handle unknown elements the way other browsers do. The way we expect browsers to work is that if they don’t understand an HTML tag, they’ll effectively ignore it. They won’t apply any formatting to it by default but if you want to go and apply your own CSS styles to that, that tag that it doesn’t recognize, you should have that freedom to do it.

But for whatever reason, Internet Explorer doesn’t treat unknown tags that way. If you’ve got a start tag and an end tag, it treats the start tag as the start and end of that unknown element and then it ignores your end tag later. So in order to get HTML5 tags like <header> and <footer> and <section> and those kinds of things to work in Internet Explorer, you need to add some JavaScript to the top of every HTML5 document that kind of forces Internet Explorer’s hand. It exploits some quirky behavior that can actually trick Internet Explorer into recognizing and treating these elements properly. And so a lot of people avoid using HTML5 as soon as they learn that, in order for the site to display properly in Internet Explorer, they’re going to have to have JavaScript enabled on all of their clients’ browsers. That seems like a big enough reason not to use it and so most people shy away from it.

But Newism had – I guess it was the perfect project for this kind of thing. It was a one-page only design project for a law firm and they said “To heck with it, we’re going to use HTML5.” So they did it, whole hog with all of these elements that most developers aren’t even aware of; they’ve just heard of them in connection with HTML5. They tried out <article> and <header> and <footer> and <section> and found it really changed the way that they approached coding.

Did you read this blog post, Stephan?

Stephan: I read part of it, yeah. It’s interesting that they can – just the way they went about it is really cool.

Kevin: I’m not sure I would recommend anyone else to do the same experiment unless you have that sort of perfect low-risk project like Newism did. The only people I knew who were actively working with HTML5 were the guys at 99designs and for those who don’t know, 99designs used to be SitePoint Contests within the SitePoint Forums but they have split off into their own company but they’re still working with us at SitePoint Headquarters and I knew that they were doing some experimentation with HTML5 but in a more conservative way than the Newism folks did. So I went down and I cornered Adam Schilling, their front end developer, for a few minutes and here’s what he had to say:

Kevin: I’m here with Adam Schilling, the Designer and resident Front End Ninja in 99designs and I wanted to talk to you, Adam, because I know 99designs recently did a bit of an experiment by putting a bit of HTML5 into its home page. Is that right?

Adam: Yes, that’s right. The front page is now, in a pseudo sense, compliant with HTML5.

Kevin: What does that mean, a pseudo sense?

Adam: Well, we’re not using all the new elements strictly that are in HTML5 particularly the ones that aren’t covered by Internet Explorer but in place of those, we are using class names that are representative of those new elements. And so we’re sort of still thinking in terms of HTML5 but not necessarily using the full HTML5 spec.

Kevin: So what are some of these elements that you’re representing as class names at the moment?

Adam: Right, so things like <nav>, for example, wherever we have navigation, we’re using the nav element as a class and sort of using ID to sort of distinguish between the various nav elements but we get this nice crossover effect, just using Cascading Style Sheets to sort of bring those all together.

Kevin: So you use a <div> with class="nav" or a list with class="nav"?

Adam: That’s correct.

Kevin: Right. So why did you do this and are you happy you did?

Adam: Oh yeah definitely, and I think this would be the way that we want to continue forward. We’ve wanted to try HTML5 because there’s a lot of talk about it and we wanted to sort of be – you know, we wanted our side to be relevant, we wanted to learn by using the new spec particularly with the decision sort of coming out that XHTML2 wasn’t going to sort of go forward and we needed a front page redesign and it just seemed logical. When we’d figured out that we could use pseudo-HTML5 to sort of complete the whole from page redesign, it just became an interesting experiment and one that didn’t really have any downsides.

Kevin: So yeah, I mean the only real code that you could point at and say “that is HTML5 code” would be the DOCTYPE at the top of the page, right?

Adam: Essentially, yeah.

Kevin: Yeah and I think the <meta> tag that says the character set that you’re using.

Adam: Yeah, we’re using a sort of a minimal definition for specifying UTF-8.

Kevin: So what would it take for you guys to take the same plunge that Newism did? Obviously, they had a pretty cherry project. It was one page, they could take some risks and have a bit of a play with it, and if anything went wrong, it’s just one page. They can revert back to the old way of doing things. What’s keeping you from taking that leap in the work you’re doing?

Adam: For us it’s purely about the new elements that aren’t recognized by IE and we’re just not prepared to go the JavaScript throughout. It just doesn’t make sense to sort of take that big risk. With everything we do, wherever we’re using JavaScript rather, we’re trying to write code that can fall back on something that’s still usable and still resembles somewhat what the user has come to expect in previous incarnations of the site, so yeah.

Kevin: Nevertheless it’s an interesting experiment to read about. I mean did you learn anything?

Adam: Well, it was interesting to see another account of how it was – a lot of what they have come across I’d come across as well and I was faced with the decision at the beginning of the process of whether or not we’d use this JavaScript alternative.

Kevin: I mean I guess you probably, in order to get your pseudo HTML 5 working that same way, did you read the spec and then think back to how that would translate?

Adam: Yeah, I remember reading up about <header> and <footer> specifically and at the time there was—I mean there might still be—a fair bit of debate about why these new elements should be used. There’s a camp that is fixed on the idea that <footer> is something that sort of happens at the base of your page only, it’s not sort of happening within articles or sections, and there’s another camp that sort of saying in terms of like a byline or something, per-article or per-post you can have footage nested.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m pretty sure the official thinking on that has actually changed since the 99designs home page was done. So that’s something that you probably would have done differently than what we’re seeing in the Newism example. So in short, pseudo HTML 5 is what you’d recommend at the moment to someone building a new site?

Adam: Absolutely, absolutely.

Kevin: Thanks.

Adam: Thank you.

Kevin: So based on that chat with Adam, I think SitePoint is going to have to publish an article about pseudo-HTML5 because much as I’d like to tell everyone to go out and find just the right project in 2010 to experiment with some real HTML5 code, I think the downsides… as much as Newism pulled it off, I think there are big enough downsides to using HTML5 in the real world right now that I can’t really recommend it.

One that I need to ask the Newism guys about, because they didn’t mention it, but something that’s come on my radar as I’ve been researching this is that even if you apply the JavaScript to a page, Internet Explorer won’t use that JavaScript when you print the page. So even though the page may look right in the browser, if you wanted to print it, it’ll then display that page without the JavaScript code when it goes to print it and it could break your layout just like that.

So it’s a risky thing they’ve done. I congratulate them for doing it. I think for most people you need to try and find a way to do this pseudo-HTML5 that 99designs are doing. Keep your HTML4 elements but start using HTML5 structures so that when the time comes to really use HTML5, you’re familiar with that way of doing things.

On a less technical bent, we have MySQL in danger of acquisition by Oracle. The Web is up in arms. It seems like everywhere I look I’m reading about this effort to keep MySQL out of the clutches of Oracle.

Guys, have you read about this?

Stephan: Yeah, I thought it was dead like six months ago.

Kevin: I think a lot of people did. Oracle said they wanted to buy MySQL. The European Commission said that’s not going to happen, and everyone sort of thought they could rest easy.

Stephan: Yeah and I guess not.

Kevin: It seems like Oracle put up a statement saying these are all of the evil things we promise not to do with MySQL if you let us acquire it and the European Commission made some noises saying, well, this is an important – they’re turning over a new leaf and I think this maybe the thing that turns the deal in their favor and it sounded like they were going to let it go ahead.

So the creator of MySQL, Monty, as most people know him, he started a petition at HelpMySQL.org and he’s asking for anyone all over the world who cares about MySQL and wants to make sure it doesn’t get acquired and killed by Oracle to sign up. It was launched over the holidays. I think it’s pretty much not the worst time of year to try and do something like this but things were moving fast. He was afraid that the European Commission was going to approve this over the holiday, so he launched the petition and in just one week over the holidays, they collected 14,000 signatures. As of January 4th, that’s the number that they presented to the authorities and in the couple of days since then up to this recording, they’re now up to 21,326 signatures. At this point they’re collecting over 2,000 new signatures a day. But yeah, they say in less than one week, this is quoting from their press release, “During the holiday season, we gathered 50 times more support than Oracle claimed three weeks ago when it presented a few hundred orchestrated letters from customers to the European Commission.”

So it sounds like Monty has numbers on his side.

But Stephan, what do you think about this? Is Oracle acquiring MySQL really that disastrous a proposition?

Stephan: I’m not really sure they’re going to kill it. I don’t think they would. I think that they would have an uprising but they might. I mean, I think he said that they apparently lose a billion dollars a year to MySQL installations. So a billion dollars is a good chunk of money to any company. So maybe killing it is not a bad idea for them.

Kevin: Is that one of those numbers like when the music studios say “We lost $50 trillion to piracy this year”, counting everyone who downloaded an MP3 file illegally as someone who would have otherwise bought that album? Is this one of those artificial numbers that if Oracle killed MySQL, would they really get a billion dollars in business or would another open source database spring up and everyone move to that?

Stephan: Yeah, I don’t know.

Kevin: That’s what I think.

Patrick: Yeah, I don’t think Oracle said that and for the sake of disclosure, I’m actually an Oracle shareholder, but I found Monty’s points interesting. I think it’s an interesting story just because of how important MySQL is to countless websites, how many people run MySQL and don’t even think about it, how many open source software scripts already just simply run on MySQL right out of the box from forum software (which is what I use) to everything else?

No, he’s looking for two things: Oracle to either divest MySQL or to change the license of it to a more permissive open source license. I mean obviously if Oracle buys Sun, MySQL is a part of that package. I don’t know if Oracle has an obligation to make nice or how important Monty’s thoughts are. I think it’s a political war on some levels. What he may call the letters contrived or well-orchestrated 300 or hundreds of letters, I’m sure those are letters with real names attached to them, real companies where an online petition with 14,000 and plus may or may not be influential if he wants to tie the names, who these people are, how influential are they, how many customers do they have and what their influence is because at the end of the day, a hundreds of letters with real names associated with them could be worth way more than 14,000 random signatures on an online petition. I think it’ll be interesting to watch just because of the influence of MySQL. I don’t know. I’m not particularly worried but he seems to be and obviously, it was his baby so that makes me pause for sure.

Kevin: You’re right that the unique position, the fact that MySQL is so crucial to the Web at the moment makes it – even if it’s a small risk that Oracle are going to do the wrong thing or that MySQL will suffer as a result of an acquisition … with any other product I might say, well, let’s take the risk and let the market sort it out but with MySQL, that’s a big risk to take.

Patrick: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that and I think that’s why there’s an uprising. I don’t know. I guess the EC or whatever the regulatory boards are will have to get some experts in there, some technology people. I’m sure they already have them to sit in there because this is a really techie, tech-savvy discussion as far as databases and what that means because even the majority of the customers of MySQL and of Oracle’s databases really aren’t that technically involved with them. So it will be interesting to see how high level those discussions are and what the end result is.

Stephan: I was going to say let’s not forget that Sun bought MySQL for a billion dollars, right? I think that was the original purchase price. Maybe that’s where Monty is getting his number and I think that people need to remember why Sun bought MySQL and why they want it.

Kevin: Why?! I couldn’t figure it out at the time!

Stephan: I couldn’t figure it… that’s my point is you can’t, you can’t tell me why Sun bought it. The only reason I can think of is that they had a connector, right? They have JDBC and they wanted a database to pass out with Java.

Patrick: Well, here’s the thing, I think his post… it’s a long post but there’s an FAQ in there because he’s definitely invested in this from a business perspective because he benefited from the sale of MySQL to Sun. He got a portion of that money, and he is in this business of forking MySQL. I mean I’m sure he has the best of intentions – not judging in any way – but he definitely has his own conflicts here and one of the questions that he answers is “Sun paid a billion for MySQL. What did Sun buy?”, and he says they bought the MySQL trademark, they bought the copyright to the MySQL server and other components, in his opinion, control of the MySQL economic ecosystem, access to their community of 15 million users and 15 million installations, their customer contracts, their core developer contracts and all other assets of MySQL AB. So that is what he says they got for a billion dollars.

Obviously there is value there in the customer contracts in the community. I guess the catch with these communities, with open source communities. and when they become a business item or an object is always how do you monetize those properties. It’s a services business. Obviously, Sun saw a value in that and now Sun is now looking to go with Oracle where they had been hated competitors in the past. Monty says that he was on board with Sun because he felt the company was the right one to have MySQL under their umbrella but obviously, he doesn’t feel that way about Oracle.

Kevin: Well, yeah, reading his big Frequently Asked Questions, the key difference for him is the fact that Oracle has a competing product in their Oracle database, various incarnations of their Oracle database servers, whereas Sun didn’t have a database product or at least not a significant one in the market.

You said it’s a very technical argument but it’s also the fact that MySQL is an open source product makes a lot of the implications of acquisitions and stuff like that less than obvious because on the surface of it, you say “Okay, MySQL is open source, it’s released under an open source license. If Oracle does acquire it, they can do whatever they want with it but that open source code base will still exist, worst case, up to the day that Oracle acquired it. And if people aren’t happy with what Oracle does with that product, they can take that code base and go their own way with it.”

The issue is that what Oracle is buying is really the commercial rights because MySQL is a dual-licensed entity. You can get it under an open source license for free but because it’s the GPL license, anything you build with it must also be released for free but if you want to build a commercial product on top of MySQL, you have to license it commercially and that’s the crucial thing that Oracle would be getting control of here. Anyone who has a commercial product built on top of MySQL will be losing control if Oracle takes over and decides to kill that as a commercial product.

Stephan: Here’s one thing that I disagree wholeheartedly with Monty on, and that is, are Oracle and MySQL truly competing products? Anyone who has used Oracle knows that it is not a simple product but MySQL is, and he makes a statement that Oracle hasn’t been able to get into the web area because of MySQL and I think that’s completely false. I think the reason that Oracle hasn’t made the move into the Web is because it’s prohibitively expensive and it takes a lot of technical knowledge to get it running and working the way you want.

So are they truly competing? Yeah, they’re competing because they’re both databases but they’re not competing in the way of an apple from one farm stand to an apple to another farm stand; they’re not the same. I think that’s a poor argument for this and I don’t think people should fight against Oracle taking over MySQL just because of that. I think if you’re really a GPL person and you really believe in the open source code, then that’s a good reason to support MySQL and be against this, but to say that Oracle is going to kill it because it compete, I don’t think that that’s a good argument.

Patrick: Interestingly, he answers the question “Who would be interested in buying MySQL if Oracle made the decision to drop it from the portfolio?” and one of the companies he mentions is IBM…

Kevin: (laugh)

Stephan: (laugh)

Patrick: …Fujitsu, any of the major Linux distribution vendors. So I mean it’d be interesting, one big company to another, IBM. He says because IBM DB2 and MySQL are working in mostly different markets and our salespersons very seldom compete with DB2; that’s his reasoning for IBM.

Kevin: Right.

Stephan: When Novell bought SUSE, the Linux installation, that kernel I guess, everyone thought it was going to die. I don’t think it’s dead, right? I still see SUSE installations all around so I think we’d still see it and hopefully, they do, Oracle, does dump it from their portfolio, I’d love to see an open source project like Fedora pick it up or something.

Kevin: Our last story today is about Blippy.

Patrick, what is Blippy?

Patrick: Well, Blippy is – I saw a lot of services launching these days. It’s very similar to another service we all know and love, Twitter, but Blippy is more or less for your purchases. When you buy something in an online store, if it’s hooked up to your Blippy account, it will tell your followers, and I guess there’s a public profile, Blippy is private right now. I don’t have access to it, so I can’t go on anything but screenshots and there’s a blog post at SitePoint about this as well that we’ll link to in the show notes. But more or less, as you purchase something that you opted to share with Blippy, it will automatically update your feed telling your followers how much you spent and in many cases what you bought.

So if you buy something from Amazon, it’ll tell your followers what you bought and no matter how embarrassing. If you hook it up to your credit card, I guess you can hook it up to your credit card and to your bank and so on and it will tell people you spent X amount of dollars at this online store and then they can comment and kind of talk about your purchases and maybe buy those things as well.

Stephan: That’s it. The internet wins. I’m out. I’m done. (laugh)

Kevin: (laugh) What happened?

Stephan: It’s just I don’t know the point of this. I don’t get it. I kind of get Twitter, but I don’t get this.

Kevin: I was listening to the MacBreak Weekly podcast a couple of weeks ago and they were talking about a new bathroom scale that would automatically tweet your weight every time you weighed yourself with it. This has a similar ickyness associated with it for me. It’s sharing something that – I don’t know… maybe I’m old fashioned, but it seems to me that the information about what you buy should be something you share on a case by case basis deliberately and consciously.

What kind of people… I can imagine a very small niche of people – the—I don’t know—‘commercialist exhibitionists’ out there wanting to use a service like this but could this ever be a mass market service? Could this ever be something that more than a thousand people want to use?

Patrick: I’m not sure. I think more than a thousand is a good possibility as far as mainstream service. I don’t think so. I do think that it has some potential though for that niche audience and I’m not sure that it’s a super small audience either, consider what people share online and how they aggregate it already.

If you hook it up to your online stores, it’s a way of sharing the music you’re buying. It’s if you’re aware of it… I’m sure there are ways you can stop it momentarily and buy something that you don’t want your followers to know about. But I definitely think it’s something that some people will pick up on and will enjoy. And then I think that there is – we know making money is a big thing and if people are already talking about products they’re buying and that’s the basis of the service and then they do achieve some level of scale and some audience, it’s not hard to see how that could then by monetized with the product data and with the affiliate sales and so on and so forth.

So they have some people that are well known, that are behind it or at least pushing it like Jason Calacanis and Philip Kaplan and some others. It will be interesting to see – me, personally, I’m with you; I don’t expect to use this but when I think about aggregation in general and how people share things, is a lot of the content you see in your Twitter stream of followers really that interesting? No, maybe not to you but some people will be interested in purchasing and they’re sort of interesting in this. I don’t know if it’s a curiosity thing or a voyeuristic desire or something like that, but it’s an interesting thing.

One of the concerns I saw on the comments at SitePoint was sharing their bank and credit card information and I think that’s a legitimate concern. But I think of this almost in a way as Mint. It’s kind of like playing with your money. It’s like a game in some level. Mint is obviously useful, I’m a Mint user, and I had apprehension to sharing my bank information and my credit card information but I looked into it and I decided to go ahead and do it, and I’m sure that Blippy is operating under the same security principles. So I don’t think that’s such a big deal but obviously, that’s a road block for them is that trust that people need to have and then to share this purchase information.

Stephan: I don’t know. I think my gut tells me it’s too much focus on consumerism. I don’t know. Me, I’m kind of the guy that you don’t need to buy a bunch of stuff to be happy and going out and watching what other people buy just seems like one of those… you know you like live in an alter universe like, “Oh, that person bought that. That’s so cool.” I don’t know. It just seems strange to me and maybe that’s me being – I’m being…

Patrick: It’s definitely not for everyone.

Stephan: Yeah, no.

Kevin: I’m kind of with you. I mean what does that say about – I don’t want to take potshots at the developers of this thing, but if you as a developer make a choice, you are the master of some internet technology and the way you decide to contribute to the world by using that skill is to build this thing for people to keep track of what they buy…

Stephan: No, to keep track of what other people buy.

Kevin: I’m curious what the philosophical argument is. The developers behind this, what drives them to do this?

Patrick: How many times have you heard someone say Twitter is narcissistic?

Kevin: Well the difference between Twitter… like 2009 was the – if for the sake of argument, we accept 2009 as the year of mass marketing things like Facebook statuses and Twitter, those things going mainstream, those things are all about being able to share whatever you want when you want to share something. But these new services, like Blippy that are coming out, are all about what the SitePoint blog post calls passive sharing. These services start to share information without you having to intervene automatically and we’re seeing a lot of sort of location base services doing the same thing. You switch on an app on your phone and from that point forward, it will automatically advertise your location, let people know where you are and what you’re doing without any intervention.

That’s an important differentiation for me – active sharing versus passive sharing.

Stephan: Wasn’t it Beacon, wasn’t it the Beacon Facebook thing that there was a whole controversy because it was sharing things people bought on websites on Facebook?

Kevin: I can’t keep track of what’s true and what’s urban legend when it comes to Facebook.

Stephan: Well, that was Beacon though. That was a big deal because you had to turn it off.

I can remember that story that some guy bought something and his wife found out about it or something and it was on Facebook. That’s passive sharing. It’s the same thing to me. I don’t know. It just bugs me.

Patrick: No, I mean the problem with Beacon is that it was this sort of covert thing where obviously, this is an opt-in thing. I mean they’re going to give their information over, they know what to expect. I think Kevin makes a great point; I think that that is a great difference between Twitter and Blippy. Obviously, they’re not the same but I look at it from the same way; people say Twitter is narcissistic. People will say this is blatant consumerism, is all about material possessions, but there will be a segment in the market I think that clues in on this and likes it and will tie it in to Twitter. A part of Twitter already is this passive sharing in automation, sharing the blog post, sharing your bookmarked items, and so on and so forth.

I’m not saying this will succeed but I’m saying I won’t be surprised if it does achieve some level of notoriety.

Kevin: It’s really interesting. We’re moving from a place where it has become okay for people to over-share on the internet. For better or worse, the Internet is a medium for over-sharing from time to time but we’re moving towards the Internet becoming a medium for the world to spy on you. For you to press a button that says it’s okay for people to spy on me if that’s what they want to do and it just goes from there. I’m really curious if the mass market is going to buy into that the way they have bought into the narcissism of over-sharing as they have with Twitter. I’m curious if they’re going to take that next step.

Stephan: We’re six months away from me never having to leave the house ever again.

Kevin: What, because you’re living your life vicariously through everyone else?

Stephan: Yeah, through everyone else, yes.

Kevin: Alright. Well, juicy discussion, guys, but all good things must come to an end and that means it’s time for our host spotlights.

Patrick, what have you got for us?

Patrick: I’m going to spotlight an article at PlagiarismToday.com. It’s the top 10 copyright stories of the 2000s. We’ve seen a lot of these articles obviously with the 00 to 09 decade coming to an end, the top stories of the decade. This one is copyright focused and talks about some of the obviously larger copyright disputes of the decade from the RIAA lawsuits to the Google Book storage stuff and if you’re interested in that sort of topic, copyright and plagiarism, I think it’s a great summary of the important articles of the decade in that area. Check it out.

Kevin: That stuff really interests me. I was really interested, again, going back to your interview with Gary Vaynerchuk last episode, and for those who haven’t heard it yet, definitely go check it out. It’s short but meaty, and I loved the insight he had into the book market and how that is changing.

Stephan?

Stephan: I was given a Magic Mouse for Christmas.

Kevin: Ooh! My Magic Mouse ran out of batteries yesterday, and I miss the flick scrolling so much.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s a really neat mouse. I love it so far and it’s taking some getting used to the size of it but I really, really do like it and I’ve had some issues with clicking and tapping because you can tap on it.

I’ve been searching and there’s an application out there called MagicPrefs and you can download it and it goes into your prefs pane and you can edit a bunch of – you can tweak more settings than what Apple lets you tweak and it’s a really cool tool. If you have a Magic Mouse, download it, it’s worth it. It’s free. It’s awesome.

Kevin: So it adds like the extra gestures that you expect. As soon as they say, “Oh, it’s a multi-touch mouse,” you’re thinking you can do pinches and zooms and things like that with it, it adds that stuff.

Stephan: Exactly, because the Apple default install stuff doesn’t have that and this has it. It’s got some cool things.

Kevin: What kind of things are you using your mouse for with it now that you didn’t before?

Stephan: I’ve been playing with the tap because as you know during the podcast, you can hear clicky, clicky and I want to get it so that I can have it so I can just tap the right and left click rather than actually clicking it and that way you don’t actually have to hear it during the podcast or it doesn’t have to be edited out and things like that. I’m doing some swipe stuff so I can quickly change applications and Exposé type stuff. It’s useful.

Kevin: The thing I miss, because my other mouse – it sounds like a bumper sticker – my other mouse is a Logitech with one of these things that’s like festooned with buttons all over it, and one of the things I use those buttons for is on the Mac to trigger Exposé. All of the windows shrink and then I can pick another window very quickly using a button on my mouse.

The problem with the Magic Mouse, although its scrolling and tracking is all very nice, it has no extra buttons for anything and so I had to go reach for the keyboard when I was using my mouse to do things like Exposé, and so these gestures I’m really interested in using them for that.

Stephan: You can just tap the Apple logo on your mouse and it will bring up Exposé.

Kevin: There’s an Apple logo on the mouse? Oh, so there is!

Stephan: You can just like run your finger down there and just tap it once and it will bring up Exposé. It’s really nice.

Kevin: Oh, great. Thank you.

My host spotlight is Instapaper.com and this is a service that’s been around for a little while. It gained popularity last year when they released an iPhone app. If you’re familiar with services like Delicious that are sort of websites that house all of your bookmarks, on the surface, Instapaper seems like one of those, but rather than being designed and specialized and set up with tools for archiving a vast collection of bookmarks, Instapaper is all about keeping track of the things you plan to read later. And so at its core, you set up a bookmarklet in your browser and you call it ‘Read Later’ and so every time you get to a blog post or something that you’re interested in reading but you don’t have time to read it right now, you click Read Later and that sends it to Instapaper. A lot of people use Delicious for this. They’ll setup a tag in Delicious, a tag called ‘readlater’ and that lets them keep a list of things that they plan to read later but they never get around to it because going into Delicious and going through that list of things to read later and clicking through each one is not a fun process. When you have a bit of spare time, that’s not the kind of thing you reach for because it’s not a fun thing to do in your spare time. Instapaper has designed its interface so that going and reading your things that you planned to read later is fun and it’s something you will want to do in your spare time.

So the main thing it does is it strips out all the navigation out of the pages. It’s very good at identifying the core piece of content from the page and only importing that into your Instapaper account. If you’ve got an iPhone, you can use the iPhone app to read just that content in a very spartan interface that isn’t marred by ad banners and navigation bars and that sort of stuff. It’s great.

Stephan: Have you noticed that you can’t do – if you have a multi-page article, it doesn’t get the extra pages?

Kevin: That is one of the problems with it. If the article is split over multiple pages, you’re going to have to add each one of those pages to Instapaper but when you get to the end of the first page, you can click the view the actual story online link and if you have an internet connection, it will take you back to the site and you can read the next page. So it’s not perfect, there are niggles.

The big feature they added just before the holidays was exporting to Kindle format so you can create a folder of related things that you want to read later. Sort of like a little digest for yourself and I did this with a couple of sites, PHPAdvent.org and 24ways.org, both sites that published an article a day for the first 24 days of December like an advent calendar. PHP Advent obviously about PHP, 24 Ways is stuff more about web design, sort of CSS, JavaScripty tips and tricks. Both of those sites, I have taken all of their articles and put them into Instapaper folders and then I can export those as a Kindle e-book and put it on my Amazon Kindle and I took that with me over the holidays and read those articles offline. It’s a great way to get through that content.

So Instapaper.com, PHPAdvent.org, 24ways.org are, together, my pick for this week.

That brings our show to an end. Sign offs, guys?

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy Network. You can follow me on Twitter @iFroggy.

Stephan: And I’m Stephan Seagraves. You can follow me on Twitter @sseagraves and my blog is badice.com.

Kevin: Patrick, you need one of those, like, 10th anniversary banners in your signoff, “The iFroggy Network celebrating 10 years of iFroggy.”

Patrick: Sounds good. You can record that for me and we can have it added it in at the end of every episode.

Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. Visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show and subscribe to receive every show automatically.

Help us promote the SitePoint Podcast. We’re trying to get the word out, get a few more listeners this year and the key way to do that is with iTunes reviews. This is your opportunity to win a free SitePoint book of your choice in PDF format. Just leave a review of this podcast in iTunes and then paste a copy of your review as a comment on this episode at sitepoint.com/podcast so we know you’ve done it. Be sure to let us know which country’s iTunes directory the review is posted in so we can find it and in two weeks’ time in our next new show, we’ll pick out winner at random and you’ll get to have your pick of the SitePoint library. Help us get the word out.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #14: The Cyberdyne Bill
2. SitePoint Podcast #16: Online Marketing Inside Out
3. SitePoint Podcast #11: Interview with Microsoft’s Chris Wilson

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• SitePoint Podcast #42: Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk (MP3, 18.3MB)

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Interview Transcript

Patrick: January 1st, 2010. Author and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk helps us ring in the new year with advice to help you get off to the right start. This is the SitePoint Podcast #42: Interview with Gary Vaynerchuk.

Patrick: Hello and welcome to another edition of the SitePoint Podcast. This is Patrick O’Keefe and I’m alone today as I interview Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur who took retailer Wine Library from a $4m business to a $45m business in just five years. Along with brother AJ, he runs VaynerMedia, a brand consulting agency that focuses on social media. He’s also the host of the popular online video show Wine Library TV, and the author of Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines, and Crush It! Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion, the latter of which is the first in a ten-book deal he signed publisher Harper Studio. He video blogs at garyvaynerchuk.com, but on Twitter he’s known simply as @garyvee.

Patrick: Hi Gary. Welcome to the show, thank you for joining us.

Gary: Thanks for having me.

Patrick: Well, we’ll get right down to business then. We’re at the end of 2009 now so we’re kind of taking stock of, I guess, what we’ve accomplished. What has this year meant for you?

Gary: You know I think it was a big transition year for me. Globally, at the most important level, I had a child, little Misha, a little girl back in May. So that’s obviously by far, the biggest thing that happened to me this year.

Professionally, I think it became a year where more people looked at me as more of a media business guy than just “the wine guy”. Obviously Crush It! came out, so becoming a best selling author is a really cool thing and so those two things really stand out.

Obviously launching VaynerMedia was a big deal and I’m excited about that.

I would say those are the things that really stood out.

Patrick: Cool. Congratulations on all of that. My220x in the SitePoint Forums asked this question. He wanted you to go back to when you first started to get serious about growing your business through social media. What was your first experiment? What was the first thing that you tried in social media to promote your business?

Gary: I guess it all depends on how you define social media. I was very much active in wine forums and wine blogs and I guess that was the web 2.0 movement. I guess if you define social media of more some of the Twitter, Facebook stuff; I started using Twitter in January of ’07 so that would maybe be my first foray into that.

So it really just depends on how you define it. I mean I think answering your email has the principles of social media. I guess definition becomes imperative here but what I understood was that the Web was becoming more connected than we had ever seen before and that’s kind of what I focused on.

Patrick: Oh yeah, forums are totally social media. I wrote a book called Managing Online Forums and it’s funny because they are sort of like not the backbone, but sort of the foundation of social media in a way.

How did you apply or how have you found it to be different from those early days on forums and blogs to some of these newer buzz brands or social tools that we’ve come to know today?

Gary: I just think that more people are involved and by virtue, the more people that are involved, the bigger the whole game is, right?

Patrick: Right.

Gary: And so I think that stands out to me that with more people involved, everything is becoming so much more scalable. So just the fact that more people are in the game, everything is so much more accentuated and grows to such bigger levels and I think that’s very imperative and important and exciting to watch.

Patrick: SitePoint cofounder Matt Mickiewicz, a friend of yours I believe, threw out a few questions for me and I’m going to ask them now. His first question for you was – How can individuals in the services business like consulting, design, development leverage social media to their benefit?

Gary: I think social media is all about listening, right?

Patrick: Right.

Gary: I think it comes down to listening. There’s a whole lot of talking going on out there and if you open up your mind and are willing to listen, I think you can really do a lot of damage and I think that any business should be creating content and listening. That becomes the blueprint, create great content and give customer service. It’s very basic but there’s way too many people not creating content and there’s way too many people not listening and when you combine both, you win.

Patrick: Right. Is perfection the enemy of progress? You’re famous for uploading your shows without editing and it hasn’t really hurt your viewership. What do you think that means?

Gary: I think it means that real and authentic and content always wins. Content doesn’t have to be polished to win. Contents can be content, right?

I mean there are people that love guys who wear suits and ties and there’s people that love guys who are in jeans and t-shirts and they both work, right? And so I focus on that; I think there are different ways to skin a cat.

Patrick: You’ve taped for the past two years or so without skipping a beat and you’ve discussed how the viewership didn’t come right away for you, how it took you some time.

How should entrepreneurs stay motivated if they don’t get the result they are looking for? We seem to live in a society of instant results where people expect something within a certain period of time. If they don’t get it, then they’re deflated and they give up.

Gary: I think people just have to recognize it takes time. You don’t build real multi-million dollar businesses in 45 minutes. It blows my mind that people kind of think that you can and that’s pretty much it. I mean nobody built businesses in five minutes in the past and this is not going to happen in the future either. Things can scale quicker, things can happen quicker but it’s not going to happen. I mean it’s just way, way too many people are completely blindsided by what’s really going on here and what’s going on here is that people are building real business and they take time. You just can’t build in five minutes, you just can’t and if you don’t have the patience, you’re going to lose because patience is by far the most important attribute in building a big business.

Patrick: I guess that’s maybe sort of the downside of the great American or the great success story. It motivates a lot of people but then the perception is that it happens overnight, right?

Gary: Yeah, there’s no overnight success. You’ve heard so many people say that, it’s so darn true. I mean it’s just not out there. It’s just not out there. Show me somebody who did it overnight and I’ll promise you that I can prove to you that it wasn’t done overnight. The end. It’s really that simple, you know?

Patrick: Last question form Matt – Aside from Crush It!, do you have any favorite business books that you would recommend?

Gary: You know this is where I have to be massively authentic; I don’t really read business books at all. I just don’t. I’ve read like four books in my whole life. I know Gladwell and Gauden and all these guys but I’ve just never read the books and so I can’t recommend a book because I’d be a fraud if I was to make one up.

Patrick: Right, there’s nothing wrong with that. I think for me, I run a network of websites, and I didn’t really read any books on… I’ve never read a book on like HTML or any of these things that you need to know to run a site; I just kind of did it. Experience is as good a knowledge builder as anything else.

Gary: Listen, I wish I did read more because I guarantee I’d know more. I’m not naïve to not understand that I would miss out on not being in the trenches. The fact of the matter is though I spend so much time with my fan base, that’s regurgitating and getting emails and interacting. That’s kind of where my learnings are done and blogs and things of that nature.

Patrick: And I think that speaks to the need to actually do things rather than just read about them and learn them to actually get out and experience something and that’s something that I think you talked about in the book too.

Gary: No question.

Patrick: @JosephHurtado on Twitter wanted to know – How do you go from a barebones idea to startup to working business? Kind of a general question but any thoughts would be appreciated.

Gary: You know, very general, I think you got to not worry about the idea but understand the execution involved. I think the execution involved is something you need to stress and pay attention to way more than the idea. I think way too many people get caught up in the idea and I think that that is an issue and it hurts people. I think the ideas are fine but they’re a dime a dozen. It’s can you see a very clear plan of execution that I think more people should pay attention to.

Patrick: It reminds of a video by Ze Frank called Brain Crack. I don’t know if you seen that or not but basically, the idea is that people get addicted to brain crack, to the love of their own ideas and how beautiful they are and they never actually go out and accomplish anything. Does that resonate with you?

Gary: Yeah, I think there’s a lot… you know Ze is a smart guy and he thinks a lot about those kinds of things and I think there’s a lot of value to what he’s talking about there because I agree with that immensely.

Patrick: @godonholiday on Twitter wanted to know – How important in your eyes is the look or design of a website?

Gary: Imperative. If you read Crush It!, it’s the only thing I can tell people to spend money on.

Patrick: Speak to that. What are the things that people spend money on that they shouldn’t when they should put it toward design? What are some of the bad things they spend money on?

Gary: Early on, SEO, buying AdWords, spending money on traveling to places where they think they’ll get value. I think you put your head down, you have a great design, and you make sure your website is right, that’s your home and put your head down and hustle and get involved in the community you’re a part of and that really becomes what you need to do.

Patrick: As a follow up to that, what would you change on your own site?

Gary: Quite a bit. I think I’m doing a lot of things wrong from the site. It’s actually one of the biggest things I’m thinking about going forward and so I would say a lot. I just haven’t looked yet but quite a bit.

Patrick: Dennis on Facebook wanted to know – What advice you would provide to midlife career changers in this economy.

Gary: Recognize that we’re living through a different time where you can do so much now by executing in the social media sphere and then in the new Web. The internet is maturing. It’s only 15 years old. The opportunities are endless and you’ve just got to jump in there and take a look at it.

Patrick: Molona on the SitePoint Forums said you’re big on passion but how do you cope with all the things that can turn the passion down, such as annoying customers, non-paying customers, annoying providers and so on and any other stuff that makes you want to throw your computer in her words “to the bin” and leave the ordinary world totally? So simply put, how do you keep the passion alive with those things happening?

Gary: Because I’m very aware of how lucky I am and it’s all about perspective and being thankful and that’s it. Just recognizing that those things are minor compared to the health of your family or the fact that I have this opportunity that people are listening to me or have a business. They’re just small. These things are quite small in the scope of what’s really happening.

Patrick: You just talked about travel being one of the things people spend on early on and they shouldn’t. When do you get to a point where that becomes valuable to you or getting out to conferences and things because I know you speak at conferences and you obviously benefit from them. Is there a certain level where you should think about that?

Gary: Yeah, it’s probably very, very, very quickly. What I mean by that is if you can afford to go to a local meet-up, you do it right from the get go. I just think that people buy a $4,000 conference ticket before they’ve done anything. That’s what I meant earlier.

So if you could afford very early on to go to any events locally, people are what build businesses, it’s about the networking, it’s about your people skills, it’s about the people you know and way too many people overlook that.

Patrick: SitePoint of course is a web design, web development community, have you or did you, Gary Vaynerchuk, ever play around with design programs or like FrontPage or did you open up this software and play around before you feel comfortable spending money on it?

Gary: No.

Patrick: Never tried?

Gary: No, never tried. Always drew it and then handed to somebody to execute.

Patrick: Crush It! was your first book. What have you, I guess, learned during the process of launching book 1 that you wish you would have known beforehand?

Gary: Well, I did that already because I wrote a wine book before the…

Patrick: Oh, that’s right, I’m sorry, that’s right. I actually have both of them too.

Gary: No, no problem.

Patrick: …that’s pretty bad.

Gary: No worries. Well, you know everybody heard the 10-book deal so they call this book 1 on that deal. So I get it, don’t worry about it. The reason I did that was I wrote the wine book to learn as much as possible and I learned a lot, which is what I had to rely on, which was me and not the publisher and what was important and they helped me quite a bit to make this last book successful.

Patrick: Right. Because I know as an author too, I found that there really wasn’t much money out there marketing wise for book publishers and I found, I was pretty a small fish, and I found that with people, they had much larger audiences too and I guess they put some money behind you, but these days it really is imperative. It’s a lot like the music industry I think, right?

Gary: Well, they really didn’t. Most of the deals I made, I made it by myself because they put in the room to succeed. There was not a lot of money thrown my way. Not even close.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m not surprised. I compare it a lot to the music industry. I think that in the music industry, it’s kind …

Gary: I think you’re right. Absolutely.

Patrick: There’s a lot of front end money but then once you get the book out, it’s on the author.

Gary: No doubt.

Patrick: So you’ve given a lot of interviews. What has been the interview that you feel has helped the book the most? What publication outlet online or offline has readership/viewership has been most beneficial to you, do you think?

Gary: I think that’s a great question. I would say a couple of things stand in mind. I think the CNN piece that I did on a Saturday was very big. Scott Simon, Weekend Edition, NPR was very big, and I would say doing TWiST, This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis was very big as well.

Patrick: So what’s one that may not be as obvious? I mean, obviously CNN is huge. Jason is well known; I like Jason a lot. What’s the interview that you did that you going in you thought, “Well I don’t know…” but then when you came out it was a big deal?

Gary: Actually I think Jason’s. I mean I know Jason’s big and all but it’s not CNN or NPR, or all the other television and newspaper I did. I think why Jason stood out was we were there for an hour and it was so honest and we were so cool and just like – it was just so real and there was a lot covered in that hour interview. I mean I did FOX Business, I did other big things – newspapers, major radio – I’ve done a lot of big things and other TV stuff that didn’t have the same impact.

Patrick: So let’s stick to book publishing because a lot of people – and it’s true the book publishing industry is an old industry and they’re making progress but they’re still not quite there yet. What are some of the things that you have seen in the book business that you think the industry needs to get on to very quickly?

Gary: Well, the book industry is broken. Anybody who’s in the middle that doesn’t provide marketing value is broken, in my opinion. So that’s it. I mean that’s where the publishers sit today. They need to learn how to market. They can’t just rely on being in the middle because they’re not needed. You can go direct to Kindle in a year or two.

Patrick: Right. I guess their value to me when I was looking for a deal was in access. The access that they have and they currently hold, and it’s a grip that they’re losing but still when you’re talking about Barnes & Noble or something like that, for the average person…

Gary: 1,000%. Their access to retail is by far the biggest thing they have.

Patrick: And do you think that’s something they’re going to be able to hold on to for a while or is that the saving grace or is that something that’s slipping away? Because like you say, we have the Kindle, we have e-books. We have an Amazon sales rank that’s publicly available, that bookstores can look at and say these books are selling well online. Let’s find a good author and get in our stores regardless of where it comes from.

Gary: It is not something I believe they can hold on to.

Patrick: But you still signed the 10-book deal and you’re someone with a huge audience who could very easily sell books to the – and basically does sell books directly to their audience anyway, deal or not. So I guess the value for you totally was in access and the up front money. Correct?

Gary: No. The big thing was the access to the retailers and the fact that the web share on the backend was 50-50 instead of the normal 10% or 15%.

Patrick: That helps.

Gary: That was attractive. That was a big reason, and because I still don’t think we’re all the way there yet. The last couple of answers I gave are much more of a reality of three to four years from now, not today. So they still have control of the retail relationships. I think in two or three years I can just hit up Barnes & Nobles and Best Buys, and places myself be it a DM or a tweet, or just a cold email. And so for now, they still hold that and that was definitely the reason.

Patrick: Yeah, I wrote a post about someone who wanted to get a deal and have an agent but they wouldn’t have any interest and the key is to just bring people to you, create the audience that makes people come to you. The music industry, again, the label execs hear your record playing in every club then they’ll come to you I think.

We have a lot of conferences in the web development, programming, social media space; South by Southwest, Blog World Expo all come to mind. You’ve spoken at tons of them, all of them. What do you think are the most beneficial two or three conferences for someone who is in this space, in this web technology development social media space?

Gary: South by Southwest for sure. The Web 2.0 Series by O’Reilly and FOWA – Future of Web Apps by Ryan Carson.

Patrick: What do those conferences offer that the others don’t? Is it strictly in the quality of the audience, the networking?

Gary: Yep. That’s it. Period. The content is never the game. It’s the people that are actually there that you can network with. Perspective.

Patrick: Yeah, perspective. Right. Since this is the January 1st, 2010 show of the podcast, I wanted to ask you this. So it’s December 31st 2010 and you look back on the year 2010, what are the some of the things that you want to say you accomplished?

Gary: What things do I want to achieve in 2010?

Patrick: Right.

Gary: Spend more time with my family. Spend a little more time putting my head down and building VaynerMedia and Corkd. Those two things really stood out for me.

Patrick: Okay great, Gary. Well I think we’ve tackled all the subjects. I appreciate you talking with us today and have a great 2010.

Gary: Dude, thank you so much for taking the time and having the interest. I appreciate it and I hope you have a great holiday.

Patrick: You too, man. Thanks. Goodbye.

Gary: Thanks, man. Bye bye.

Patrick: Again, that was Gary Vaynerchuk, who, among other things, is the author of Crush It! Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion. The book, for the website, is crushitbook.com.

Thankyou for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, (ifroggy.com), and I’m @iFroggy on Twitter.

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom.

Have any thoughts about this interview? Please visit us at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have any questions for us; we’d love to read them out on the show and give you our advice.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad. Thank you for listening and have a happy, healthy, and successful 2010.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #11: Interview with Microsoft’s Chris Wilson
2. SitePoint Podcast #5: The Principles of Successful Freelancing
3. SitePoint Podcast #1: The Economy

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• SitePoint Podcast #41: BuddyPress with Andy Peatling (MP3, 41.3MB)

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: December 20th, 2009. Brad Williams speaks to the author of plugins and themes that turn WordPress into a social networking powerhouse. This is the SitePoint Podcast #41: BuddyPress with Andy Peatling.

Brad: Welcome everybody to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’m your host, Brad Williams, and this week, I’m joined by the founding developer of BuddyPress, Mr. Andy Peatling.

Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy: Hey Brad, thanks a lot for having me.

Brad: Absolutely. So why don’t you kind of explain to everybody who’s not familiar with BuddyPress what exactly it is and what exactly it does.

Andy: Yeah, so the idea of BuddyPress is to take a new or existing installation of WordPress, or WordPress MU actually specifically, and rather than having the focus directly on the blog, it takes the focus and puts it more on the user. So you keep the existing blogging features, but you add features like extended profiles, private messaging, friends, groups, activity streams. So it’s trying to allow the user on the WordPress installation to kind of socially interact with other users on the same install.

Brad: Great, yeah. BuddyPress as a product is still fairly young. I mean, I know it’s been around for, what, a few years now, but I guess in the open source world, that is kind of a younger project.

When exactly did the project start?

Andy: Well, I mean, I started actually – the idea came around in kind of the middle of 2007, and it started with a client project with WordPress MU and they wanted a social network built, but I kind of built a few plug-ins then and that kind of like spawned the idea, and I thought well let’s make something open source and let’s make it available for everybody else.

The idea came from then. I started developing in mid 2007 and it kind of gained a little bit of momentum in some of the early versions of some of the features were built. I was just a freelancer at that time, so I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it and it kind of fell by the wayside. So then fortunately Automattic picked me up and employed me to continue working on it full time and then the development really started ramping up. We had the first beta version, I think, in December of 2008.

It took about 10 months of development to the first beta version and then the second beta was in February of 2009 and then actually the first 1.0 version was in April of 2009. Actually, the final version of 1.0 now has only been around, I think, about 10 months, 9 months – so not too long, not even a year yet.

Brad: You mentioned some of the features that comes with BuddyPress. Let’s dive into those a little bit more and kind of explain in a little greater detail how exactly those work; the first one being extended profiles. BuddyPress, like you said, actually puts the focus on users and it creates essentially a social networking profile for the users within WordPress, is that right?

Andy: Yeah, that’s right. BuddyPress is a combination of eight different features, among them is profiles. Basically that allows users or site admins, actually, to come in and create its specific profile fields that users can fill in.

For example, if you add a social network that was going to focus on soccer, you might create fields for users. They could fill in their team name, what’s their favorite ball, or what brand of soccer cleats do they use. So it allows users to come in and sign up and fill in those profile fields and then create a profile that’s displayed to every other user on the site.

It also adds some other features, like avatars; they can upload their own avatar and display that on the site as well.

Brad: And how flexible are these fields; are we talking just text boxes or is there a little bit more to it? Can we actually do drop-down select menus and checkboxes and things like that?

Andy: They’ve got a few options. I think there’s nine or ten different types of fields you can put in there – you’ve got radio button fields, date selectors, text areas, just regular text box – there is a whole range. So it’s based on what information you want people to fill in or the type of question you’re asking, you can select an appropriate field type.

Brad: So I guess this begs the questions, are these – when you register on the website and you create your custom fields, is that site wide or is that specific to that one particular WordPress MU blog that you’re on?

Andy: No, I mean, BuddyPress is a sitewide plug-in, so when you activate BuddyPress on a WordPress MU install, it’s globally activated on all the blogs and you use the root blog of your installation to set everything up. The user fills out a profile on your BuddyPress installation and that profile data can be accessed on any of the blogs. So you could display a profile widget on any blog or any blog that the user belongs to; so it’s available globally.

Brad: So it kind of connects and joins all the individual blogs into one big community almost.

Andy: That’s right, yeah, it’s kind of aiming to be the glue to stick all these things together and allow more interaction between authors.

Brad: Awesome. Another great feature is private messaging, which doesn’t exist on WordPress at all, so it’s fully a WordPress feature. Now is that like we would expect from Facebook where we can just message other users?

Andy: Yeah, kind of. It’s the ability for you to privately message each other and it’s done in an email style, so you’ve got an inbox, you’ve got a sent box, and then you can compose and it will auto-complete on any friend connections you have. So if you start typing a friend’s name, it will auto-complete and you can Tab and add more users. It kind of functions like email and it functions in a very similar way to Facebook mail that you see on Facebook. I think it’s nice to have and that people can privately take part in conversations across the site.

Brad: That’s great, and you kind of mentioned the next feature, which is friends, so you can actually have friends with other users within the network.

Andy: That’s right, so you can make friend connections. You might use it to connect with other offers. You can add friends to your friends’ list and then you can follow the activity of those friends, keep track of them across the sites, track what blog posts they’re posting, that sort of thing.

So yeah, you request a friend/friendship and then the person accepts it and that friendship connection is made.

Brad: Do you have to be a friend to message other users, or can you message anybody that’s in your network?

Andy: No, you can message anybody but the auto-complete only works on friends’ names, so you can start typing friends names and it will complete on their actual real name. You can also type the username into the box and send messages to anybody on the system.

Brad: That’s awesome. The next feature – and this is one I think a lot of people really love (me included) – is groups. Can you explain groups a little bit and how they kind of work in BuddyPress?

Andy: Yeah sure. I really feel like groups is one of the most powerful features of BuddyPress and it’s really allowing you to group content and start conversations around a specific topic. So anybody that’s a member, or a member of a site, can come in and create a group and you can provide certain fields like group name and news and descriptions of the group, and then each group has an activity stream that you can post to. It currently has a wire where you can post little messages. It also has a forum where you can start forum topics specifically for the group. Users can then join up with the group and you can have conversations around specific topics.

In BuddyPress right now, there is a really cool group extension API that plug-in developers can come in and create new features for groups. So, it’s really powerful. I think it’s one of the most powerful features of BuddyPress right now and it’s improving a lot all the time as well.

Brad: Yeah, I think it probably is one the biggest draws to BuddyPress. Now, as far as privacy options, are there ways to have, say, private groups?

Andy: Yeah, there are three options you can set. There’s a public group, which appears across the whole site and anything that’s posted in that group, people can see publicly and anyone can join the group.

And then there is private groups which anybody can request to join, but it has to be accepted by the administrator of the group or the group creator and all the activity within that group is actually hidden until you’re a member.

And then finally, there’s hidden groups where you can’t see that group at all anywhere in the site. It won’t show up in search results. You actually have to specifically be invited by the group creator to be able to join the group and even see that it exists.

Three levels of privacy built straight into groups.

Brad: And that comes with the default. Like you said… the groups is really… and it works a lot like kind of the Facebook groups with members.

Andy: Those privacy levels are quite similar.

Brad: I noticed you can have within a group, you have the group admin, which I’m assuming is the user who created the group, and then you can also have mods. What exactly is the difference between the two user levels?

Andy: A group admin, they have the ability to delete the group obviously, and they have abilities to promote members within the group. They can also change a few other details that moderators don’t have access to.

The moderators really are there to moderate the forums if there’s a group forum and they could also, I believe, they can kick users from a group as well or ban users from coming back into the group. So they have some lower-level access, but things like ability to delete and that are all limited to the administrator of the group.

Brad: And you mentioned forums, so let’s just talk about that next. BuddyPress has forums integrated directly into it?

Andy: Yeah, it’s actually using another project called bbPress that’s kind of built along the same lines as WordPress. So it uses bbPress to power the actual forum functionality in BuddyPress, and it used to be kind of crazy to be able to integrate bbPress and BuddyPress but in the last version, some new functionality was introduced where you could just click one button and it automatically sets up the forum functionality for you, so it’s quite simple to do. And instead of just having kind of global level forums and forums being completely separate from any of the social and interactive features of the site, it’s actually completely integrated into groups.

When you create a group, you have the option to create a forum at the same time and then threads and topics that are posted in that forum are kind of attached to the group. You can create a forum on topics of very specific subject matters all inside that group and give actually access levels to, like we just said, moderators of groups and administrators of groups to delete threads, sticky and closed threads. So it’s all set up within the group.

Brad: Yeah and then the integration process that you mentioned, I know that was a big feature a lot of people had requested and even myself back… my first exposure to BuddyPress was back in January of this year, before that had come, the integration process happened and it was… do you remember how many steps that was? I want to say it was like 12 or 15 steps.

Andy: Yeah, 15, I think. It was kind of like you had to be… it had to be a rainy day, and you had to be sitting in your kitchen for it to work and it was like very specific scenarios. It’s like magic.

Brad: It was. I got it working but it took some – you know I had to bang my head on the desk a little bit and I did get it working but yeah, having the one-click integration is a godsend. I know the community really…

Andy: I think it’s very important to me. You don’t want to start using new software and have to go through all these steps. It was just a fun right way to integrate a separate – bbPress as a separate project and finding the right way to integrate that simply… it just didn’t happen in the first version but actually now, it’s a one-click and people are pretty happy about that.

Brad: Yeah, and so bbPress is a separate project, so I guess that begs the question, is… do you have to download the actual bbPress software and then push it up in the BuddyPress or does that come with BuddyPress when you download it?

Andy: It actually is linked via Subversion as an external into BuddyPress. So, actually when you download the packaged version and the ZIP, it goes out and requests bbPress.

Brad: So it grabs the latest version.

Andy: It does grab… it’s the latest tagged version of bbPress.

We take the latest tag that we know that’s going to be compatible and trunk changes aren’t going to break things. So, yeah just pulls it in automatically. There is nothing really you have to do other than go into the administration and then just hit the button to install.

Brad: That’s what I like; just hit the button and everything works.

Andy: It’s the best way.

Brad: It’s the only way to integrate things. Let’s talk about blogging because WordPress MU, the main feature is it allows multiple blogs within one installation of WordPress, and BuddyPress sits on top of MU so obviously you still have that WordPress MU blog functionality. So how does that integrate into BuddyPress?

Andy: BuddyPress tries not to play around with how blogs integrate and how blogs work. It kind of leaves that alone but just tries to enhance around that blog. So if you’ve got an existing MU installation, it’s not going to mess away with the way that people write blog posts and they way they go into their WordPress dashboard and write new posts and organize their posts. So what it does, BuddyPress actually adds a navigation bar at the top of your installation and that appears in all of your blogs and all of the BuddyPress pages and actually gives users the ability to select the “My Blogs” menu and find the blog that they want to post on and they have options like post a new post or change the theme. So it allows users to come in, no matter what page they’re on, to go and easily access to write a new post. It will also track any blog posts that they write, any comments that they leave on a site no matter what blog it’s on and it also gives them the ability to easily create a new blog, it adds a new page for that as well.

Actually most of the features around blogging in BuddyPress kind of are tracking features. So they’ll track new blogs and track posts and track comments, kind of integrate that into activity streams and show on your profile which blogs you’re a part of and which comments you’ve left on which blog. It doesn’t really affect any of the posting or any of the actual interface for blogs. It just really enhances by tracking and adding a few new features.

Brad: And one thing that BuddyPress does that a lot of people kind of assume WordPress MU does out of the box, which it doesn’t, is it aggregates all that blog content kind of into one central location, is that right?

Andy: Yeah, exactly. So it’s really just tracking. It’s monitoring when new posts are posted, which blogs they were posted to, when new blogs were created, and any comments across the whole network no matter what blog they’re on; it will bring that all back into one central location mainly or just basically into the activity stream. So anybody on the site can take a look at the activity stream and see posts as they’re posted and see comments as they’re commented. So it kind of brings it all together and aggregates.

Brad: Speaking of activity streams… why don’t you explain it because I know that activity streams have kind of evolved in the last few versions of BuddyPress. How exactly do activity streams work, what do they do and what’s kind of the feature of those?

Andy: In the current version, really the activity stream is about aggregating all of the activity across the whole site. So it’ll track blog posts, it’ll track profile updates, it’ll track group creation, it’ll track posts of group creation, it’ll track posts to group wires, it’ll basically track any activity across the site. There is also a filter so you can filter and just say just show me the latest blog post or just show me any groups that have been created or new friendship connections and the kind of the newer versions that are coming out kind of taken that a step further and saying well, why don’t we make the activity stream aggregate but also allow people to post updates to the activity stream. So you can go in, you can post a new update and say what you’re doing or perhaps go into a group and post a new update that is specific to that group and about the topic of that group.

So it’s kind of becoming a two-way process. Yes, it’s aggregating everything but you can also go in and post things directly to the activity stream. Actually, even more so that we’ve introduced in 1.2 that’s coming up, activity stream comments. So people can actually come in and comments on things in your activity stream, whereas before it was just kind of you just monitored it and said okay, this is happening, but there was no real way of interacting with it. So it’s becoming much, much more interactive, and I think that’s kind of the way that it should go and it’s proven to be in the latest development versions much more sticky for people. They want to come back and comment on things and they want to interact with other people. So it’s pretty useful, I think.

Brad: Are there any plans to add a ‘like’ link to these status updates similar to Facebook?

Andy: I don’t see why not. I’d like to see that as a plug-in definitely. I think that’d be a great plug-in. Actually, that’s been requested a number of times and people want to say I like this on different types of content so I can definitely see that coming through as a plug-in and we’ll see where that goes and how it’s received.

Brad: So there you go. If you want to get involved in BuddyPress, there’s a great plug-in idea. That actually brings up a great point; BuddyPress does allow plug-ins, just like WordPress or WordPress MU does, it allows BuddyPress-specific plug-ins. Is that right?

Andy: That’s right. BuddyPress kind of rides on the back of the WordPress plug-in API, so it uses all the same techniques like filters and actions and basically your plug-in is the same as a WordPress plug-in. You just kind of checking that BuddyPress is active and using functions that BuddyPress provides. So if you know really know how to build a WordPress plug-in, you sort of know in a way how to build a BuddyPress plug-in because the fundamentals are very similar.

The nice thing about BuddyPress being written for WordPress is that you can ride on the back of an existing API. So I didn’t really have to think about how people were going to extend BuddyPress and how they would do that; the way to do it was already there in WordPress, it was just a matter of extending that with BuddyPress.

Brad: That’s awesome. That’s quite a slew of features we just went through that BuddyPress adds in. I could tell you probably spent a lot of long nights plugging away at this code.

Andy: There’s about eight different component features but the nice thing is you can turn these things off. If you just want to start a site or just add profiles or start a site with only profiles and blogs, you can turn everything else off. There’s on/off switches for all the different functionality and you can pick and choose what you want.

Brad: I think that’s great and it kind of helps people ease into in and kind of maybe test out just one of the features of BuddyPress and see how their users like it and then if they get good feedback, they might look at kind of flipping on the switch for the rest of the BuddyPress plug-ins.

Andy: Yeah, exactly. It’s not all or nothing, you can make it a gradual process.

Brad: Let’s talk about upcoming BuddyPress features I was checking out. You actually have a public roadmap of features that are going to come out in the next versions and it’s actually pretty detailed; I was impressed, even more so than I think the WordPress roadmap is sometimes. So I’m curious, was the roadmap, is that decided by you, was that a community effort or where did the roadmap actually come from?

Andy: Well, it was I think around about six or seven months ago just after the version 1.0 was released. I sort of sat down and thought what would be some great features to see in the next three or four versions and I came up with a list of about 30 or 40 I think, it was quite extensive, and what I did was I went onto IRC, into the BuddyPress chat room and discussed with some of the plug-in developers there and the people that just generally hang out and talk about BuddyPress what they thought about the list and what they thought would be important. And we just kind hashed it out and kind of whittled it down to around 20-25 features that we thought would be fairly useful for BuddyPress to include in the next couple of versions.

Then what we did was we took that list and put it on the BuddyPress.org website and kind of created a voting tool. So you add all the features in the list and you could actually rank which features you thought were most important. So if you thought something was more important that you could rank it up but somebody else might not think that that was very important and they rank it down. We took the averages over the – I think it was maybe four weeks we did that for – and basically it was just ranked in by the order of most importance based on what the general consensus was. Then we split all those features down into version numbers and the first five features were worked on Version 1.1 and then the next five, 1.2, and so on and so on.

That worked out the roadmap and it was kind of nice because it gives everybody input into what happens and it’s a community project. What the community wants is very important.

Brad: That’s one of the many reasons I love open source, you actually listen to the community to build this roadmap, which I think is the way every open source project should work and most do. So I think it’s very admirable that that’s exactly how this happened. And as you can start to see, it gives everyone kind of a voice like you said.

Andy: That’s right and at the end of the day, the community are the people that are going to use your software; they’ve got great ideas so let’s bring it all together and make something up.

Brad: I see BuddyPress version 1.2 is slated for December which we’re kind of winding down on. So you think 1.2 is going to make it before the new year or is that going to get pushed back till January?

Andy: Unfortunately, yes, it’s been pushed back because… well one thing we weren’t really anticipating developing a new default theme, so that came into the mix and that’s added a little bit of time onto the development and it just really hasn’t given enough time to introduce a fair amount of beta testing before the release. So it’s looking, realistically, it’s going to be probably mid to end of January before 1.2 is out just to give time for the testing.

And the trouble with releasing around Christmas is not many people are around to test and now is not a good time to release software, so I think the end of January is probably more than likely.

Brad: Awesome, and I noticed photo albums were listed in that update. Is that still in the plan?

Andy: Not for 1.2, no. And the reason being that photo albums is probably going to be very closely coupled with a new activity stream functionality in the way the way that you post photos, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to start developing that and to fill the foundations in a new activity stream component where it was sort of solidified. So now that’s basically being done for 1.2, and the development on that can start kicking forward and moving on. So the nice thing is there are some media plug-ins for BuddyPress right now, so if you’re desperate for photo album functionality, there’s a couple of plug-ins you can maybe test out that allow you to upload images.

Brad: There’s a plug-in for that, right?

Andy: There’s a plug-in for that.

Brad: That’s what we love to say in the WordPress community. You mentioned the new theme that just came out. I was actually on – you have a great site that tests kind of the latest version of BuddyPress, it’s at testbp.org and all the links we discuss on this show we’ll be sure to put in the show notes. But you just released the new theme on testbp.org, and it’s quite a change from the original default theme. I was wondering if you can kind of talk about that and what new functionality this theme provides and why it was decided to change.

Andy: Quite a few things really. One of the main things was usability. I felt that the original default theme wasn’t— the usability was okay but it wasn’t fantastic, and I felt that a better job can be done. It was about making it usable, making it more personal. So actually when you log in to the new default theme, you get personalized tabs so on the main activity stream, you can see just activity of your groups, just activity of your friends. And on the members groups and forums tabs, you can limit to just your groups and your friends without having to really dig into your profile.

Usability was one of the major things – get it more usable, get it easier to use, and more accessible for people.

And another thing was to make an easier base for people to start creating themes from. You know a lot of work was done in this area for 1.1, to make it easier for people to skin BuddyPress. That went well and it was easier but I still felt that there was too much CSS, there was too much JavaScript and there were just way too many template files that were difficult to skin. So it’s kind of starting at a fresh base and making it – thinking about how to make it easy for people to create a new theme. The CSS has been reduced by about a half and the JavaScript by about half as well, and there are far fewer template files and they’re kind of structured in a much more intuitive way.

So hopefully the idea is that it will be an easier base for people to start from and a good example of a base for people to start from and create child themes from.

I think it’s been very well received so far, and testbp.org, the interaction levels are much higher than they were on the previous theme. And I think overall, people are really happy with the way it works, it kind of makes a lot more sense than the previous theme did. It’s a much more consistent interface. Not to say that the previous theme is going away and that was bad; it’s still around and that’s been updated with the new features in 1.2, so that’s sticking around for some time, indefinitely, in fact. So if you’ve created themes on the previous default, that’s not going away, your themes will continue to work. It’s just an alternative, essentially.

Brad: Do you actually get both themes when you download BuddyPress, or is the old theme kind of something you have to download separately and add in?

Andy: No, you’ll still get the old theme. It was originally called BP Default, that’s actually being changed to BP Classic and the new theme is going to be the BP Default.

Brad: It’s starting to sound a lot like WordPress. So we’ll probably see these five, six years down the road, we’ll still be using these themes.

Andy: That’s right, it may well be. That’s the thing with starting a new project, you have all these ideas to begin with and you create a theme based on what you think it’s going to be. Your ideas morph and things change, and new things come along. I guess I felt like the older theme was getting – it kind of represented how BuddyPress was and not how BuddyPress is going to develop and move forward in the future. So I felt like even though it’s going to be updated, the older theme, I felt like a new theme could really… a fresh start and easier to update moving forward. So we’ll see where it goes. So far it’s been pretty good.

Brad: Yeah, absolutely. And this kind of runs into my next question, which is when working with software that is fairly new like BuddyPress is, it’s only a few years old, what can be done to kind of reassure like developers and designers that whatever they’re doing isn’t going to change on the next release? For example, WordPress is pretty structured, everything is kind of in place because it’s been around for awhile. BuddyPress hasn’t been around as long so just in the last year, you can certainly attest to this, that some things have really changed as far as how themes are made, profile and themes like that. So what can you do to kind of reassure the community out there that you’re not just going to have to redo your code every time a new version comes out?

Andy: I try hard to provide backwards compatibility and I’ve done that so far in every release. But it’s a new project and things do change quite a bit in new projects but the old code is not going to break. What I’m going to do actually or what’s going to be done is all the deprecated code, the old code, is going to be moved into a separate plug-in and that actually provides backwards compatibility. So instead of maintaining all of that backwards compatible code in the actual core BuddyPress, it’s going to moved to a separate plug-in and what you can do is people who are using BuddyPress with older plug-ins or older themes that perhaps don’t work in the new version, you can activate this plug-in and it provides backwards compatibility for this old stuff.

Ideally in a couple more versions, things are going to be particularly solidified and the way things work is going to be kind of nailed down and you won’t see this kind of constant change that’s happened in the first couple of versions… it’s just got to find its footing, and I think it’s pretty close to doing that now.

Brad: Sure, yeah.

Andy: But it has changed a fair amount from the first couple of versions, but I think that’s going to slow down significantly.

Brad: I think the plug-in idea is a great idea. It definitely goes towards the direction of trying to keep BuddyPress as lightweight as possible and I think removing a lot of that deprecated code, like you said, into a plug-in does that because if you don’t need it, why have it in there.

Andy: Yeah, it seems unfortunate if you’re starting a new installation right now that you have to still run all that old code in the background even though you’re not really even using it. So for people that really need it there and need to maintain backwards compatibility, they can just pop that plug-in and it’s no problem. But for people starting up afresh, they don’t have to install … use all of that old code in there. I feel like to continue to maintain the old stuff could be detrimental in the long run for the projects, but to get it out there and put it into a separate plug-in, I think is hopefully a good idea.

Brad: Yeah, absolutely, I fully agree. Let’s talk about migrating to BuddyPress. There is a lot of people out there that have started kind of social networks maybe through like Ning or some other platform for their company or their group. How can these developers or the administrators, I should say, how can they get over to BuddyPress? Are there any kind of importing tools to get through networks that they’ve already had established for a few years into BuddyPress?

Andy: Yeah, I mean as it currently stands, there aren’t any fully functional or useful importers at the moment. I know there are a few people talking about building a Ning importer, as a plug-in. I’ve seen it on the BuddyPress.org site. As of yet, nothing major that can be used to import existing installations.

I think actually one of the biggest problems right now is to get networks creating fully useful export files. I’m not even sure Ning at the moment allows you to export your data in full. Actually, BuddyPress doesn’t allow you to do that at the moment, so it’s just as much at fault. That’s actually on the roadmap for the next version. So I mean as much as there is no importers, there’s not really any exporters at the moment, so it’s a little difficult in this area.

It’s an interesting area because whether the direction for this will be importing or exporting or will it be actually automatically sharing information that you put on these networks, so if I come and create an account with all my information, could BuddyPress implement something that allows you to share your information backwards and forwards to some location that you have control of and you can back up?

I think exports and imports is going to be important in the short term but I think in the long term, we’re going to see more sharing of data and more backing up of data as you go along that network. So you actually won’t need these imports and exports in the long run, but that’s speculation and we’ll see where that goes.

Brad: You heard it here first from…

Andy: It’s an idea for these platforms to share their information but we’ll see where that goes.

Brad: I agree, I think that’s the way the Web is going; it’s just a matter of whether the big players kind of step up and allow that to happen with some of the smaller players. So you’re right, we’ll definitely have to see how it plays out but hopefully, everyone with the open mindset will go that reason and will go that direction.

Another hot topic in the WordPress world is the announcement that WordPress and WordPress MU will actually be merging quite possibly in the 3.0 version coming up. So my question is how is this going to impact BuddyPress?

Andy: I think it’s going to be a positive thing for BuddyPress. Right now it’s limited to WordPress MU and that automatically adds a barrier for entry for people. It is harder to set up WordPress MU, so if BuddyPress is going to work on this merged version of WordPress and it’s going to work, whether you’ve got the WordPress MU features of this merged version turned on or not. It’s going to be more accessible to people and reduce that barrier for entry and it’s going to be nice to say BuddyPress works on WordPress, rather than WordPress MU which is overall a fairly small percentage of WordPress installations, even though actually it runs a lot of the WordPress blogs out in the world, actually physical installations of WordPress MU is much smaller than standard single installations. It’s going to be a positive thing, I think.

Brad: Yeah, it’s going to open the door to the millions of standard WordPress websites to run BuddyPress should they so choose to once they hit that 3.0 version. How closely will you be involved with that? Will you actually work with the team who is on the WordPress side who is working on 3.0? I’m assuming you’re going to… well, I’m sure you guys are going to really test back and forth to make sure that when that 3.0 comes out, that it’s fully compatible with BuddyPress and the merger and everything.

Andy: Yeah, I mean definitely. I keep a close eye on the developments of WordPress on Trac and what’s going on there. There is not a lot of clear information exactly how the merge is going to happen right now. So I think once that starts coming out, then I’m going to pay close attention to that and make sure that BuddyPress is going along or following the same lines and making sure that it works on the development versions.

I try and contact the core developers of WordPress every now and then just to see what’s going on and make sure that things are moving forward with BuddyPress and everything is still going to work in the long term. I’ll provide a helping hand with patches and making sure that everything is up to date and working. That’s pretty important.

Brad: Yeah, I mean everyone’s focus right now is on the 2.9 release, which chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, it should be out unless there is some big delay for some reason. But I’m sure, like you said, after the new year, the 3.0 conversations will begin, at least the public conversations, and there will be more of a good idea of what direction it’s going to go and how it’s going to happen.

It’s pretty exciting times in the WordPress community right now.

Andy: I think it’s going to be a great move and I think it’s going to be well received in the moving direction.

Brad: I’ve got a couple of WordPress MU networks, and I think that upgrade to 3.0 is going to be probably the scariest one I’ll ever have to do. But once it’s over, I’ll feel great about it, but when I actually hit that one button, I’m going to be sweating it for a few minutes probably. I’ll take good backups.

Andy: That’s right. Make sure you backup.

Brad: I actually have a question from a community member. He’s actually pretty well known in the WordPress community as well, Ryan Hellyer.

Ryan asks, “Is Automattic’s investment in the BuddyPress project related to them aiming for WordPress.com to take on Facebook.com in the social networking space?” Has that been discussed at all on the Automattic side?

Andy: No, I don’t think… it’s never been something that’s really been discussed and talked about in any great detail. Automattic brought me on because I liked the idea of BuddyPress and they liked the idea of using WordPress as a platform and creating something new based on WordPress. I was at the point where I couldn’t work on it anymore simply because I had to work on bill-paying projects. They just said we’ll bring you on and we’ll employ you full time and you can just work on this thing; there is no real boundaries, no real direction. It was like you work on this and if it works out, great, but if it doesn’t, you know, too bad.

It seems to have worked out so far and they’re continuing to employ me to work on it full time. Not to say that some of the BuddyPress features in the future might enhance WordPress.com and allow some authors to interact more on that site, but I’m not sure turning it into a Facebook.com is the way really to go. WordPress.com is a blogging platform; people go there to blog. I think any of these social features would be there to enhance that experience.

Brad: Are there any BuddyPress plug-ins or any of the functionality actually on WordPress.com now?

Andy: Not at the moment, not so far. BuddyPress is still maturing; it’s still changing a lot. They’re just monitoring it and seeing how it goes. They’re very happy with it so far and they’re happy to continue allowing me to work on it, which I’m grateful for.

Brad: It seems to have worked out really well for everybody involved, which is great.

Andy: The community seems to be receiving the project really well. That’s great to see.

Brad: Do you have any idea what the biggest BuddyPress network is at the moment?

Andy: The BuddyPress.org site is actually over a million users because it’s connected to the main WordPress database/user database. It’s obviously not one million active users, but there is a fair few thousand active users every week, multiple thousands of users every week.

Some of the other standalone websites – testbp.org is actually over about 14,000 users now. TastyKitchen, which is another site using BuddyPress for recipes used in cooking, they’re around 20,000, I think.

In the grand scheme of things, they’re not huge, but I don’t think BuddyPress is every going to be used for huge, huge networks; it’s more for these micro-niche networks that may have multiple thousands but are generally smaller than the major generic networks that you see.

Brad: It’s a good example of BuddyPress at this point is that it can definitely handle thousands of members.

Andy: Absolutely.

Brad: I’m assuming it can certainly handle many more than that if needed and optimize on the correct servers and things like that; so it’s a good testament to the software behind it.

Andy: That’s actually another benefit of basing it on WordPress is that you automatically inherit all the possible caching solutions that you can use and things like HyperDB to use multiple database servers… I mean I’ve built in support for object cashing in BuddyPress.

If you’ve got a particular large and active site, you have the option to spread it over multiple servers and use things like memcached to cash specific objects. So there is definitely a lot of possibility to the large… much larger networks.

Brad: Awesome. Let’s jump into a couple of personal questions. I actually interviewed Matt Mullenweg back in August on episode 25 of the SitePoint podcast, and I asked him this question, and it was announced that they were going to make a movie based on Facebook – as exciting as that sounds.

My question to you is if they were to make a movie or film about BuddyPress, what actor would you like to play you?

Andy: What actor would I like to play me….

Brad: Just a refresher, Matt actually initially said Brad Pitt, I think, because his name was Brad, but I’m not sure, but then he said most people kind of say he looks like Dave Foley, which I thought was pretty accurate.

Andy: Actually funny, one of my good friends back in Vancouver, that new film… what is it now… with the vampires… New Moon, is that the one? It just came out… all the teenage girls love it.

Brad: Yeah, New Moon.

Andy: He keeps sending me pictures of this guy Robert Pattinson, who is one of the main guys in that, he sends me pictures on Skype of like this guy at a specific angle. And he’s like “God, this guy looks just like you.” And I’m {laughing} like… c’mon, he’s some sort of Hollywood actor. Anyway, apparently I look like him.

Brad: Is this guy – I don’t really know too much about New Moon, but is this guy a vampire or he is one of the werewolf…

Andy: Actually, I have never, ever, seen him on TV. I have never even seen him in any movies, so I have no idea. I’ve just seen a few pictures of certain angles of him and apparently I look like him.

Brad: I’ll have to dig that up.

Andy: I don’t know… yeah, {laughing}… go take a look. But I don’t see a huge resemblance but I don’t know… we’ll see. But, I guess that guy maybe, but I don’t know if he’s a good actor or not. We’ll see.

Brad: Have you ever been a member of SitePoint, are you a member… previously were you ever a member of the SitePoint forum?

Andy: Yeah, I was a member back a few years ago. I used the forums a little bit, but I haven’t been particularly active recently. I kind of started moving over to WordPress and just use, to be honest lived in the support forums on WordPress and talked with other WordPress people. Occasionally, I see some of the articles and I pop into the site. I actually have a couple of SitePoint books.

Brad: Hey, good plug there. SitePoint books are awesome.

Andy: There you go.

Brad: So now you know we’re going to have to look up your username and find out what your first post was just like we did with Matt.

Andy: There you go.

Brad: Don’t worry; mine are about as awful as they get.

We’re kind of at the end of the interview and just a couple of quick questions before I let you go. I know you are very busy. What are your goals for BuddyPress in 2010? It’s that time of the year where you kind of look forward and make your resolutions for the new year coming in. So what are your goals for BuddyPress in the new year?

Andy: I think just to keep pushing the platform forward and getting people using it, keeping it in the forefront of people’s minds when they think about picking a tool to create a social platform or a social network on. I’m really interested in better connectivity between all the different networks, sharing information and distributing profiles, that sort of thing – I think that’s going to be a big thing in 2010.

Definitely more media and file support – image uploads, videos, you name it – media basically and file uploads, attaching files to groups, that sort of thing.

And API development, better APIs for activity streams, for profiles, remotely accessing information… that sort of thing. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in that area as well. I’d like to see more themes and plug-ins as well, really. There’s about 85 plug-ins now… so maybe get it up to more than 200 by the end of next year maybe.

More themes as well, and hopefully with this new default theme, we can see more child themes and more usable themes coming out. We’ll see how that goes, but just moving forward and keep it going strong.

Brad: Great. Yeah. At SitePoint, we have a very large community, a lot of great developers, designers and really enthusiastic crowd. If anyone is listening and wants to start getting involved in BuddyPress, where would you send them? Where is the first place that someone should kind of start looking if they’re interested in helping out?

Andy: Well, the first thing I’d say is probably just maybe download a copy of BuddyPress and get it up and running and play around with it and see how you feel about it, take a look at the code, that sort of thing.

Designers and developers go to Buddypress.org and take a look through the forums, start getting to know people in the community. That’s always a good idea. And IRC, as well, if you use IRC, it’s BuddyPress-dev on FreeNode. We usually have a lot of conversations about development and people ask questions in there.

And I think probably if you’re specifically a designer, take a look at the default theme and look into how to build child themes. That’s probably the easiest way if you want to start creating new themes on BuddyPress. You’ve got most things set up there already, it’s easy to editing CSS and overriding certain template files.

If you’re a developer, there is also a skeleton component that you can download. It’s on the WordPress plug-in repository and that’s kind of a bare bones component that sort of just provides you with the basic features that you need to start creating a BuddyPress plug-in. Download that and if you’ve got an idea for plug-in, maybe use that as the base; that will get you going pretty good.

Just get involved within the community, maybe look at the forums and chat on IRC. Get involved. It’s a growing community definitely.

Brad: Yeah, just jump right in. Like you said, there’s a lot of different areas to get in, not just designer/developer specific. I know you have a nice Codex started for BuddyPress I was looking through.

Andy: That’s still a little light on the documentation but it’s getting better. Actually I looked at it recently and there’s a lot more stuff being added. So it’s nice that the community is starting to come in and add pages and …

Brad: It is a Wiki, right, before I tell everybody to go add docs – that’s a Wiki they can go work on?

Andy: It’s a WordPress blog but it’s set up like a Wiki. So you can edit pages from the front end, and you can go in and add pages.

Brad: Yeah, so dive right into the Codex, help out with documentation, there’s all sorts of stuff, but definitely…

Andy: There is lots of things.

Brad: Anything else that you’d like to kind of plug before we wrap up here?

Andy: No. I don’t think so. Just try our BuddyPress and see what you think and let me know. The feedback is so good to hear from people that are using it and what they think could improve or could change or how they like it. It’s just great to be involved in the community around software.

Brad: Awesome. I really appreciate you coming on, Andy. I know it’s the holiday season and like you said, everyone is extremely busy with family and friends, and so I do appreciate you taking the time to chat with me…

Andy: No problem.

Brad: …and share the BuddyPress and let us all know what that’s about.

Andy: Thank you very much for having me.

Brad: Great, and be sure to check out buddypress.org and testbp.org for more BuddyPress goodness and you can follow Andy Peatling on Twitter @apeatling and you can also follow the BuddyPress development on Twitter @buddypressdev. And again, we’ll have all these links in the show notes.

A quick note that we will be taking next Friday off for Christmas. I know you’d probably love to listen to a SitePoint Podcast while you’re opening your presents but unfortunately, you’ll have to listen to a rerun, but we will be back the following week with a brand new episode on January 1st.

I’m Brad Williams with Web dev Studios and this wraps up another episode of the SitePoint podcast.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch.

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to get every show automatically.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #25: WordPress with Matt Mullenweg
2. SitePoint Podcast #29: Interview with Roy Rubin
3. SitePoint Podcast #4: Pownce Closes Down

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

Zeitgeist 2009

• Google Zeitgeist 2009 (Google)

Public DNS

• Introducing Google Public DNS (Google)
• Hands On with Google’s Public DNS (PC Magazine)
• If you have nothing to hide… (Asa Dotzler)

Chrome Beta for Mac, Chrome Extensions for Windows

• Google Chrome Browser (Google)
• Google Officially Launching Chrome Extensions Next Week (TechCrunch)
• Google Chrome Themes Gallery (Google)
• Google Chrome Extensions (Google)

Search Fade-in

• Google’s Search Fade-In: What’s the Point? (SitePoint)
• Now you see it, now you don’t (Google)
• iGoogle (Google)

Host Spotlights:

• Brad: Google Goggles
• Patrick: The Unauthorized Biography of SEAN COMBS
• Kevin: Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found.

Show Transcript

Kevin: December 11th, 2009. Google Zeitgeist 2009 shows pop culture rules the Web; Google builds a better DNS; and Google Search gets some JavaScript lovin’. This the SitePoint Podcast #40: A Googol of Googles.

And welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast. Today, we have me, Kevin Yank, Brad Williams from WebDevStudios, and Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy network. Stephan is sadly away with the flu. Wish you well, Stephan.

It’s been a few episodes since we’ve had us all together guys, what’s going on?

Brad: That time of the year, I think.

Patrick: Illness, holidays, family… all bad things.

Kevin: Well, it’s something of a special episode that Stephan is missing and it just seems like, I don’t know, Google must have… Whatever is keeping our hosts down at the moment is not keeping Google down because they have filled our list of stories with Google stuff. Every single thing on our list to talk about today is about Google.

We’re not even going to mention Google from this point forward. If we talk about a site or a product, just assume it’s a Google site or a product. It’s going to save us a lot of time.

To begin with, we have the Zeitgeist 2009, not the Google Zeitgeist, it’s just the zeitgeist because every thing is Google on the show today. This is something Google does every year, it seems like. I think they’ve done it every year from at least 2006 onwards, although they may be doing it for longer. They do sort of a survey of search traffic through the Google Search engine and it shows trends about the year behind us.

So Brad, Patrick, what did you notice in the results this year?

Patrick: You know, one of the things I found funny about this was under fastest rising for the US, #5 is hi5, the social network. It just seems out of place on this list with Twitter and Facebook, and you don’t really think of it in that realm. I mean, the top five are Twitter, Michael Jackson, Facebook, Hulu, and hi5. It just seemed kind of strange to me that they made it up there. I think that’s probably— I’m not sure how meaningful it is to their traffic, but I’m sure it’s a boon for them to be ranked about highly on this year-end rating.

Kevin: I haven’t even heard of hi5. Here in Australia, hi5 is a kid’s band like Sharon, Lois, and Bram!

Patrick: What’s with the Australia and all of these kids band? The Wiggles were out there. The Wiggles are like the highest paid Australians in the world, didn’t I just hear that somewhere?

Kevin: Yeah, it’s our biggest export—kid’s music.

Brad: I don’t really think hi5 is the top 5 social network overall.

Kevin: No, it definitely not. Something must have happened that they were mentioned and a lot of people were searching for them. Do we know for a fact that this search is related to the social network? It wasn’t something else? Hi5? Or maybe there were like three things called hi5 and they band it together to make a high search ranking.

Brad: I mean it’s spelled exactly like the search engine – hi5.

Kevin: Okay.

Patrick: Yeah, so it seems like it is. Brad?

Brad: Yeah, I was actually looking at the global fastest rising top 10. There was this a couple of terms that I didn’t even understand what they were, so I looked them up, and the one that kind of caught my eye was #3 and it’s pronounced as “twenty” apparently, and it’s a Spanish social network. I haven’t heard of this before, but I did some research on it.

It’s a pretty interesting story because it was developed by basically one guy in the spring of ‘06. Launched, and now it’s the fastest Spanish-speaking social network or the largest, I should say, Spanish-speaking social network on the internet, which is pretty impressive story. The fact that they launched not too long ago and they are as big as they are, so I was kind of fascinated that that was up to #3 and it was just behind Michael Jackson and Facebook for total global search keywords.

Kevin: I looked at the Australian numbers because under more regions at the bottom, you can pick particular countries and it looks like every – I don’t know, every place that has a Google office was asked to do their own zeitgeist and the Australian one is really pop culture centric and that’s something I noticed overall in all of these.

I guess when I use Google, most of the time I’m sitting at work and I’m looking up at some technical detail about the Web, and I get used to the fact that Google is a search engine that spits out technical facts for me, but looking at the zeitgeist, it seems clear that the thing that Google is most used for is for pop culture, for finding out about celebrities, about shows, and about social networks, but again that’s internet pop culture, I guess you could say.

The Australian ones are all about TV shows. There is a huge TV show in Australia, a reality show called MasterChef. I don’t know if you guys have heard of it, but it’s just one of these elimination— People who don’t know how to cook come on and trying to be master chefs, and they’re given the same ingredients and they have to try and make something interesting out of it each show. I never watched the thing, but in July, which I think was probably the finale of the show for this year, the searches for MasterChef exceeded the number of searches for recipes on Google. So there was more people watching TV about cooking than actually cooking in Australia in July, it looks like.

Plenty of things about celebrities who have died and it’s interesting obviously, Michael Jackson #1. Number 2 was Jeff Goldblum who didn’t actually die, then Patrick Swayze, then down at #5 Kanye West – dead! It’s interesting that Google searches are not a good source of facts. And breakups, very big in Australia. A lot of bands breaking up, but #2 was Telstra breakup, which is our big telecommunications company here in Australia. It was broken up into smaller pieces and so more people were searching for information about the Telstra breakup than about any other celebrity breakup or band breakup except for Oasis. Oasis was #1.

Patrick: I’m glad you brought that up because I actually also looked at the Australian numbers in preparation for this podcast, and I noted the rest-in-peace column – the dead column – and I don’t know what’s up with Australia, but five of the people on it are not dead. After Kanye West, there’s Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson who is an actress, and then Rick Astley – five out of the ten at least. I don’t know who Suki Stackhouse is – it seems like a character in a novel or something, but I have no idea what the heck that is, but I know that five of the ten are not actually dead, so…

Kevin: It’s something we do here in Australia, and I say we, counting myself as an Australian, but I’m really not. It’s an Australian culture phenomenon called the “tall poppy syndrome” that if someone becomes a celebrity and this is something we talked about in your social media conference presentation that people resent people with celebrity and it’s especially notable here in Australia. When people get popular enough, suddenly the press starts fantasizing about their death. It’s very, very creepy.

Patrick: That oddly disconcerting. I don’t know about Australia… I did notice that the #1 fastest rising term was 1HD, which appears to be a sports TV network?

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a new digital TV channel.

Patrick: That’s interesting, and then Twitter.com was second not just Twitter, but the URL, Twitter.com.

Kevin: Yeah, very strange.

Patrick: I found that interesting too, and I think the key to the success of this show down the line is getting Brad Williams and Kevin Yank to be nude or dead or both – dead and nude at the same time. I think that combination will allow us to break traffic records.

Kevin: If we have learned anything from these results is that Brad and I have to be neither nude nor dead for the Google search results for those terms to be stupendous, so just mentioning it I think is enough.

Patrick: Right. Start the rumors, internets.

Kevin: The second story is public DNS. And this big company we’re talking about all day today is also releasing a domain name service. This is something you may or may not be aware that your internet service provider gives you, but every time you type a web address in your browser or use any program that accesses a server on the internet, typically it translates a name into a numerical address. So sitepoint.com maps to a particular series of numbers.

So your computer is constantly asking your internet service provider what is the numerical address for this name, and Google has decided that this is now the slowest thing about the Web and so they’re going to do it themselves. Just like they did with Chrome, they decided all the other browsers were too slow, so they’re going to build their own browser to show people how a fast browser is done. They’ve decided the next lowest hanging fruit to make the web quicker is to make DNS lookups quicker.

Brad, you said you’ve configured your computer to use Google’s DNS?

Brad: Yeah, and about 30 minutes later, my cable modem locked up for about 20 minutes. I don’t know if that was a sign or not.

Kevin: It was too fast! It couldn’t handle it.

Brad: It was so excited, it fried my modem. I barely got it working for this podcast, so that’s good.

Patrick: That’s the next product, the Google modem, that’s what you’ll need.

Brad: The Google cable modem. Yeah, I actually configured it up. So I’m actually running it right now. I’ve been running it for a few hours now. I mean, to the normal web surfer, I don’t think you really going to notice. I mean, it’s hard to gauge this by watching how fast it loads the page or how quickly it starts to load the page and resolve that domain name or whether it has sped up it any. It happens in such milliseconds, it’s hard to determine.

I pulled up some speed tests by PCMag.com, and they actually did some benchmark tests against their default DNS, the Google DNS, and then Open DNS, which is another provider kinda like Google, and it was all just millisecond differences I mean it’s something you would never actually notice.

Kevin: Were they testing popular sites or were they more obscure sites?

Brad: They tested for PCMag. They test some larger sites like eBay and Amazon, and then some other types who work on it obscure that I hadn’t heard of.

Kevin: Okay, because I was reading Google’s sort of technical documentation on what they’ve done and why they did it and some if it is just— They’re saying just a sheer number of names out there are slowly overwhelming the servers. So if your internet service provider 5 years ago set up their DNS machine, chances are it’s handling a lot more names today than it was five years ago and as a result, it’s under-provisioned, as they call it, and they can’t keep up with— And so, like, it’s cash sizes and big enough to be useful and that sort of thing.

Part of what they’re doing is just making sure that they have a sizeable enough cluster to handle today’s DNS demands in an efficient way, but the most innovative thing they’re doing with this has to do with pre-fetching results. A particular name also has a time to live and expiry time associated with it.

When I check the address of sitepoint.com, that record says, “Here’s the address for now, but this might only be valid for 30 minutes,” say, so that if we ever change to a new server, it will only take 30 minutes in theory for that new address to propagate over the Internet. That means if no has asked your internet service provider’s DNS server what the address of sitepoint.com is in the last 30 minutes, then when you ask it, rather than giving you a cached result, it’s going to have to go and ask the authoritative server for that address.

What Google is doing is keeping tract of which names are popular or most likely to be requested and making sure that even though no one has asked for their addresses lately, it is checking back with the authoritative server to get the latest IP address ahead of time, so that when you ask Google’s DNS, it can give you an answer right away rather than having to ask the server.

That seems to be the core innovation here, and they’re saying that in a worst case scenario, if you hit an obscure site that hasn’t been asked for recently, then a particular DNS lookup can be on the order of hundreds of milliseconds and if the sites has CSS files and JavaScript files and image files hosted on other domains, then those lookups can pile up. I think this is probably a worst case scenario, but the graph they have on their technical page has something like sort of five serialized request. So over the course of an 11-second page load, it had to do five requests that added up to 7 seconds and so in theory for that particular worst case scenario, they could shave 7 seconds off of an 11-second page load if they sped up DNS really quickly.

Brad: Another kind of secondary benefit that I didn’t think about initially, but kind of stumbled upon is by using Google’s Public DNS servers, it actually eliminates your ISPs from kind of hijacking the not-found pages. If you visit a domain that doesn’t exist, a lot of ISPs and mine was actually doing this I use Comcast. It will come to the search results pages powered by Comcast that says “This doesn’t exist,” and then it’s covered in ads. So basically, anything you click on is an ad.

Kevin: I really, really hate that.

Brad: Yeah, it serves no purpose, there’s no way to turn it off. So by using Google’s DNS servers, it actually eliminates that and instead, it will come up with “not available page” just like you would see in Chrome, which is really nice.Now, whether or not I will change or not and turn into Google ads, who knows, but for right now, it just tells you it’s not available.

Kevin: So it seems clear that at least this week Google has completely taken over this podcast, but with this particular announcement, it seems like Google is progressively taking over the Internet. Piece by piece, they’re going, “Well, there’s another piece of the internet that you guys aren’t doing a good enough job at, so we’re going to rebuild it ourselves and prove that we can do a better job.”

Are we going to get to the point where although the web is an open standard, everyone is using the Google Browser with the Google Web Server and the Google Search Engine and the Google Public DNS… Is it all going to be Google?

Patrick, are you using any Google things?

Patrick: I do use Google things: Google AdSense, Google Search. That’s primarily… I’m sure there’s other products in there, I use Google Maps occasionally, Google whatever, some different Google stuff. I think it’s interesting because there’s always this discussion about Google and giving them too much power and there was like an interview with Eric Schmidt about him saying where if you don’t want to people to know that you’re doing something, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it, and he was answering that in question of sharing your secrets with Google and typing in search terms and how this data is used. Some people tool umbrage to that basically, he’s saying you shouldn’t do something, well, you should know about it.

So I mean there’s this train of thought where if they have too much power over the Internet, it will be bad for everyone – I don’t know, I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory, but I do like some separation from Google. There’s nothing wrong with putting your eggs in different baskets, and I’ve discovered that revenue-wise from my websites too where I have been hit by being too involved in one area. So I think it’s a good idea to separate, but at the end of the day, you’re going to use what works best for you. If that’s Google, then that’s Google.

Kevin: It’s a little depressing that Google does all of these things better than anyone else. You know, in my mind, there should be a company that is best at doing DNS and they provide the DNS and a company that is best at building browsers and they provide the browser, but it just seems like, I don’t know, Google has so much money or so many people working for them that anything is web-related or internet-related, they’re just at the top of the game.

We saw that on the desktop with Microsoft. For a while there, although the desktop computer, you could install whatever applications or whatever OSes you want on it. Everyone bought a computer with Windows on it and they came with Microsoft Office and you used… Anything that Microsoft released for Windows was the best thing available. You wanted an encyclopedia for your desktop, you bought Microsoft Encarta because Microsoft built the best encyclopedia and it seems like Google is the Microsoft of the Web.

Patrick: I think it starts with being dominant in one thing. I mean, I think that’s how you make your foothold. Google, obviously, was Web Search was what they created their business around and then they used that money to jump into these other arenas and then that’s how they’re building out, and I think Microsoft was similar with the operating system and then branching out.

I like capitalism and all that stuff, so I think of it as this is kind of cyclical—one corporation is big and dominant now or maybe multiple corporations, but there’s always room in this market, in this industry for someone to come up and innovate and do something differently and they can be the next big corporation, so I’m not all that worried.

Kevin: As cliché as it is to say that Google is not being evil in particular case, they seem to be doing the right thing just as they did with the browser. They’re announcing it saying, “Look, we think we can think of some ways that DNS can be done better, and we’re going to try it and everything we learn, we’re going to make it open source and we’re going to share our results and so that eventually everyone else who makes a DNS server can implement these same things.

It seems like this public DNS is a test case for them and it seems likely that if it proves to be much faster, internet service providers will be installing Google’s DNS software in a few years’ time.

Patrick: That could sound a lot scarier if you added a few words and uses a spookier voice like for example, “Google said they would open source this and share it with … the government.”

Kevin: Yeah, it’s all spin, but compared to the way Microsoft dominated the desktop, I think Google’s dominant position on the Web is a much more open way they’re going about it. Everything they’re doing is backed by an open standard that someone else is free to take and run with. It just seems like the only people that have the time and money to run with these things right now in a convincing way is Google, but you’re right. I think it is cyclical, and it’s a matter of time.

Patrick: So do we drink every time you say Google or how does that work, because I thought we weren’t supposed to mention them.

Kevin: I forgot to mention the drinking game at the top of the show.

Brad: Wouldn’t get past the second article!

Kevin: Listeners at home, pause this podcast and get your favorite drink out because there will be plenty of opportunities.

Our next story is about … Google! And Google Chrome specifically. We were just talking about the Google Chrome browser and the biggest gripe that I’ve had with it for a long time, and Stephan, I’m sure, would echo my sentiment if he were here today as Mac users, we haven’t had Chrome on the Mac and at last, we do.

Google has released Google Chrome Beta for the Mac, and in the same week, they released extensions for Google Chrome for Windows only.

Brad: Yessss!

Kevin: One-upped yet again. Brad, tell us what we’re missing out on as Mac users.

Brad: You’ll catch up eventually. Well, it actually hasn’t officially come out yet, but they’re speculating it should come out next week or what they’re calling their extensions gallery, which will essentially be a portal or a web site where you can go on and browse different extensions and install them. They’re kind of comparing it to the Chrome theme gallery that’s set up now where you can kind of browse through different Chrome themes and easily one-click installation-type stuff. There has been a lot of kind of unofficial ways that you can install extensions, but I’ve never actually got those to work a lot of them, and it’ll be the nice to just have the official way to install extensions finally coming to Chrome.

Kevin: Are you sure it’s not up? I’m looking at chrome.google.com/extensions, and it looks like a directory of extensions and there’s an install button. It’s just disabled because I happen to be looking at it on the Mac.

Brad: Yeah, it would appear. I see. What you actually have to do— It’s telling me to install the Beta Channel of Google Chrome to install extensions. I don’t know if it’s… It looks like there’s some kind of beta.

Kevin: Ahh! Well, listener, by the time you hear this, we may have Google Chrome Extensions live, but it’s exciting and we don’t have it on the Mac yet.

Alex Payne, who interviewed on this show just last week on Twitter said, “Until I can manage bookmarks, block Flash and ads, and use 1Password, Chrome for Mac doesn’t exist for me,” and I have to agree with that one. I am also not going to be switching to Chrome until it’s a full-featured browser, but good on Google for getting it on the Mac.

Brad: The big question is will Chrome maintain its speed once you get 4, 5, 6 extensions installed.

Kevin: That is the big question.

Brad: That’s been a big draw for me. Just the speed alone blows everything else away.

Kevin: And that was the draw for Firefox when I first switched to it from internet Explorer. “Wow, it’s so much faster,” but load it down with 5 or 6 extensions and depending on what those extensions are and how well they’re written, suddenly you have a slow browser again.

Patrick: Why the heck is an ad blocking extension the fourth most popular extension on their web site? Have they forgotten their business? What the heck is going on here, Google? Get it together. You’re hurting everyone.

Kevin: That’s sounding a bit like sour grapes from someone who runs a network of sites supported by ads.

Patrick: Yeah, I’m saying you’re hurting everyone that includes me, it includes Google, it includes our audience, so anyway, that’s another topic…

Kevin: What are they thinking?

Patrick: I don’t know, it’s Google.

Kevin: So yeah, download Google Chrome for Mac and also for Linux. They released the two at the same time. They have a beta of Mac and Linux available at chrome.google.com. Check it out if you want a no frills browser that goes really fast. Maybe you do.

It’s not just their browser that Google is adding extensions and boondoggles too, they have also been working on the Google Search Engine. If you go to google.com, you might notice something missing and that’s everything except the logo and the search box and then you move your mouse and the rest of the page fades in magically. There’s a blog post on SitePoint questioning the value of this called, Google Search Fade-In: What’s the Point?

I’m not sure I agree with this blog post. Guys, let’s just take an informal poll: the fade-in—love it or hate it? Brad?

Brad: I hate it. I think it’s ridi— I don’t even get the point of it. I’d like to hear why you like it.

Kevin: Patrick?

Patrick: I don’t hate things like this because the world is already too full of hate as it is, Brad.

Kevin: Aww…

Brad: Oh boy, here we go.

Patrick: So that’s the honest truth, though, but I don’t hate it. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. I have to say I haven’t seen it. I still can’t get this work on a Firefox logged in or not. I did get it on IE and I see what it is. To me, it just reminds me of playing around with JavaScript. I hate to say it but I don’t know what’s powering it, whatever, but that’s just how – it feels to me, this fade in, fade out. I guess it’s an aesthetic.

Kevin: So the deal here is that they just have the search box and you can type in your search and press Enter without ever seeing any of the rest of the stuff on the page, but if you move your mouse they go, “Oops, you might be looking for another link, we better fade that extra stuff in.” Why do you hate it Brad?

Brad: Well, the main reason is I’m at a use Google Reader and Docs on a daily basis. So when I go to Google, more than half the time, I’m going to click on that ‘more’ link at the top or to click on News. So now I actually find myself, even though it happens in about a second, I find myself almost waiting for that. I have to wait for it to show up before I can even click on it. So I feel like it’s kind of slowed me down and sure, I can just set up bookmarks or whatever but it’s just kind of a habit. I go up there, I click ‘more’, I click on whatever I’m going to and now that I feel like it’s kind of slowed me down even if it’s half a second or a second, whatever it may be, and it just seems kind of pointless to release something like this blog about it, tell people how everything’s fading in. I mean I realize they want to focus on search but I don’t get it. Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me.

Patrick: The weird thing for me is that I like to see statistics. I wonder if Google has these, I’m sure they do, they have everything, on people who click on the text box even though if it’s already the focus, even if it’s automatically the focus, how many people click on the text box because I tend to do that out of habit and I cannot navigate the page without those things appearing, so I would have to get in a habit of, “Okay, it’s automatically in there, don’t move the mouse at all or the links will show up again.” So I just type it and then press Enter and I would guess that a lot of people, I don’t want to say a majority, but a lot of people click on it first. So I don’t know how that actually works, if people actually care. I guess this is Google. So they did their studies, their usability studies, their in-person labs, and all that. So I’m sure they figured out it was worth it.

Kevin: Their blog post says they tested about 10 different versions of the fade-in and this is quoting from the Google Blog: “Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the home page that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics.”

Patrick: Surprising.

Kevin: How do they measure user happiness anyway? “Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with our doodles.” These are the special Google logos they put up on particular days. “The barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism.” On one of the days I think it was ‘buy nothing day’ or something like that. They replaced the Google logo with a barcode that I assume meant Google and yeah, on that day the – I’m looking at the screen shot, the Google homepage was just a barcode and a text box underneath.

Brad: I’m just surprised Google doesn’t give any way to kind of turn that off. I mean as a setting under your Google account or even – you know, I’ve always kind of wondered why they don’t allow you to customize the menus a little bit.

It would be very easy for them to make a switch. You could turn that off if you don’t like it.

Kevin: There are already some Greasemonkey scripts out there for people who have browsers with the Greasemonkey extension that let you switch off the Google JavaScript code for the fade-in so it makes it go away but I find it interesting that you use google.com as your gateway to all of Google’s services. I guess I tend to log in to like apps.google.com to do that but technically, that is a gateway for people administering a Google Apps domain. So that is as arbitrary as going to google.com. I think for a customized entry page, Google wants you to use the iGoogle page.

Patrick: I’ve never used that in my life.

Kevin: That is sort of – yeah, google.com/ig, which is like the personalized homepage service and I think then, you can fill it with widgets and all that sort of stuff and it’s still got the Google search at the top. I don’t know if you need to remap google.com to iGoogle, Brad, to solve this problem for you but yeah, it is interesting how different people use different entry ways into the Google universe.

Patrick: It just doesn’t seem like it’s a change aimed at the regular, average surfer, I don’t know. It seems like it’s a change aimed at the techies who are using shortcuts on their keyboard and they know how many mouse strokes they need to make and how they limit that and stick to the keyboard. I don’t know. I don’t think that the average person appreciates the links not being there like I’m thinking of my grandfather or my parents.

Kevin: Patrick, you do hate this.

Patrick: I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it. I’m just arising pros and cons on this.

Brad: You’re mad at it.

Patrick: No, no, no, no, no, pros and cons.

Kevin: I’m going to say I actually like this. I think it’s a great user experience change.

I think most people come to this page wanting to do one thing and that’s type something into the search box and do a search and all of the stuff they’re hiding, the copyright links at the bottom, the links to all the other Google services at the top, the thing to log in to Google with your account or see your account details, the number of people clicking those links when visiting this page is so small that to burden the eye, to give you the user, that cognitive load of having to decide to ignore that stuff consciously and go for the search box, if they can hide that in a way that doesn’t prevent people from using them when Google detects that that’s what they want to do, I think it’s a great thing. I think that’s design at its best.

Brad: You know this is probably what the third or fourth like visual change we’ve seen on the Google homepage just this year, just in the last few months really. I mean they expanded the search box, they put some shiny stylings on the buttons, now they have this fade-in, you know it seems like they’ve done quite a bit to the home page when its users very small changes…

Kevin: You’re right. For something they hadn’t touched it effectively for five years beforehand except… Well, really yeah. They may have added the bar at the top to log in to the different Google services but the heart of the page had not changed for years and yeah, they are definitely mixing it up. It’s like it was taboo to touch it until recently within the company and they must have had some big meeting where they said, “Look, we haven’t changed this page, everyone’s afraid to change this page.” Go nuts. It’s like they ran a contest within Google for ideas to make that page better and they’re trying them out one at a time.

Patrick: I don’t know. Go nuts? They make the text box bigger! “Oh, my gosh!” I don’t know but…

Kevin: “It’s spinning! The buttons are spinning!”

Patrick: Yeah. It’s like they had a meeting probably, “Guys, the economy is down. We can change the page now! Go!” I mean, I don’t know but yeah. To me, everything else, it doesn’t matter to me because I can’t even see it on Firefox. I don’t know if that’s a bug with me or whatever but have at it, don’t know.

Kevin: Yeah. Craig Buckler who wrote the blog post on SitePoint, his biggest beef seems to be the extra weight it adds to the page, the JavaScript code, there is a few lines of JavaScript code that make this happen and it’s a bit more code for everyone who visits the Google homepage to download, and he even points out that it’s going to add a non-trivial amount to Google’s hosting bills because when you serve as many pages as Google does, that’s a lot of JavaScript to serve up. For a company that leaves off the closing </html> and </body> tags in their pages in order to make them lighter, he points out, it seems strange to be adding special effects with JavaScript code to the page just to make it a little slicker. I wonder what the threshold is for something to be useful versus the bandwidth that it’s adding to Google’s bills.

So that is our bevy of Google stories for this week. It’s time for our host spotlights, and, Brad, I think you said you had one on theme?

Brad: Yeah, I have a Yahoo! spotlight. No, I’m kidding. It’s actually Google. Yeah, my spotlight is actually called Google Goggles and Google Goggles is a new mobile phone application and it’s currently available only on Android 1.6+ (so either Donut or Éclair versions). It is coming to the iPhone but essentially what it does, it’s kind of the snap and shoot way to search the Web so you can literally take—and there are some apps like this out there now. You can take a picture of a book and it will scan it and bring back where you can buy the book, reviews on the book, but this actually Google Goggles (oh, that’s hard to say! Google Goggles) goes a step further and you can actually not just do books or products but you can do like landmarks. So say you snap a picture, the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the examples they show, and it will literally bring back Golden Gate Bridge search results through Google right in your phone. It’s really amazing. They got some really cool videos that kind of show it and show some different ways you can use it but just the demonstrations look far beyond anything I’ve seen as far as just kind of searching before. So we’ll put a link in the show notes.

Kevin: So it’s more than an image search. It’s more than “look for other images that look like this image.”

Brad: Yeah, it’s not just products. So you can be walking in your local town. You could take a picture of, say, a restaurant and Google will scan it and then try to determine what it is that you took a picture of and if it can figure it out, it’ll bring back to relevant search results, phone numbers, addresses, whatever it may be that have to do with whatever you took a picture of. It even works with like artwork but they do have some pretty cool demonstration videos that kind of show you how all that stuff works. So just search Google Goggles and we’ll also put a link on the show notes. You can check that out.

Kevin: That is freaky.

Brad: It is.

Kevin: I’m not freaked out by technology often but this freaks me out.

Brad: It’s pretty exciting. I’m anxious for the iPhone app but I don’t have Android.

Kevin: Could someone take a picture of Brad Williams and it would bring up the latest naked Brad Williams links that we were talking about?

Brad: I don’t think I’m that popular yet but try it.

Patrick: That’s a visual. Thanks. Thankyou, Kevin.

Kevin: Patrick, what’s your spotlight?

Patrick: My spotlight is a video. It’s called The Unauthorized Biography of SEAN COMBS and Sean Combs is probably better known as Diddy or Puff Daddy and I’m a big fan of him. If you know me, you know that. I thought this was really a good example of a mashup. It takes various footage, clips, pictures, music produced by Diddy or his record company, Bad Boy Records, and it’s put together by this rapper out of Toronto named Shaun Boothe and he basically raps a biography. It’s part of his “Unauthorized Biographies” series and I thought this one was just really, really what put together as far as production-wise and just his work on it. So I thought it will be an interesting thing to checkout for anybody who’s in the video content or music and he’s got a whole series with other various celebrities as well like Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley and so on. So there’s a link in the show notes, check it out.

Kevin: That takes some stones, rapping a bio about a rapper.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: A famous one, no less. You’d want to start at the bottom and work your way up to Sean Combs I think. You mentioned Muhammad Ali. He’d be pretty high on the list as well. You would want to get his rapped bio wrong.

Patrick: Right.

Kevin: I wonder who he did first.

Patrick: The first was James Brown. It looks like James Brown, then Marley, Ali, Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, Jimi Hendrix, and Sean Combs is sixth. Oprah Winfrey is at number seventh I guess. The Sean Combs one is really the one that I picked up on and I think it’s interesting because I think as much as anything it’s kind of a tribute too. So I don’t think it comes off as egotistical or judgmental really and I think there is an end game here too and I think it is not only to create a piece of good content and to pay tribute maybe but also to gain attention, and I don’t know what his situation is label-wise or music, putting out music, he’s obviously interested in his own career too. So I imagine that’s a part of it as well but it’s just a really creative endeavor I thought, so yeah.

Kevin: Nevertheless, that order you listed is about right, I think, in terms of who you’d want to get in trouble with the least to most.

I find it interesting that Oprah is coming after Sean Combs.

Patrick: Yeah, I think it’s definitely questionable we add a little legality…

Kevin: Oprah will ruin you!

Patrick: I think it is. I don’t think he’s going to say bad things to get himself sued. Though, I will say that the one about Sean Combs doesn’t completely avoid any negative things, as all celebrities and people have negative things and he touches on those briefly, but another element of this is that on his Twitter page, Mr. Combs shared the link too. So he’s obviously okay with it and since he shared the link himself and even likes it, I guess you could say. I can’t speak to the other estates. Obviously, Marley, Brown no longer alive, Hendrix as well, but I think it will be seen as a fan’s creation more than anything else. So hopefully, it will be okay with everyone.

Kevin: See, that’s what I mean, he started with the dead people, no risk.

Patrick: Their estates could be meaner.

Kevin: That’s true. My spotlight this week is the Panic blog. Panic software is well known in the Mac world. They make software like Transmit and Coda, which web developers will be familiar with. Transmit, one of the best FTP, file transfer applications for the Mac. Coda, one of the best code editors for the Mac. And they’ve just put up a company blog, which may or may not have existed before this. I can’t really tell but if this is their first post, wow, it’s a good one, and it’s talking about the fact that Panic software apparently, as most people don’t know, they started way back in the 70’s writing VAX/VMS automation code for the textile industry and then somewhere in the 1980’s, they decided, “Enough of this automation stuff. We’re not making enough money at this. Everyone is making a fortune writing Atari 2600 games.” And so they decided they were going to write Atari 2600 games and they set about writing, I think, four games and they say in the post, “I’ll be honest, the games were disasters.” They were derivative, they were ugly to look at, they were not fun to play, and in the end, they sort of chucked it all in a cardboard box at the back of their warehouse and forgot about it until now. Apparently, they were house cleaning and they opened up this box and it was full of the actual boxes and posters that were made for these games that were never released as far as I can tell. And they’ve gone ahead and they’ve created—reading the post, it’s a little unclear, but as far as I can tell, they’ve created posters and box art for their current raft of software in the style of Atari 2600 games.

So what if the Coda code editor or what if the Transmit FTP program was an Atari 2600 game, what would its box art and poster art look like and they’ve made these boxes and posters and you can actually order them. You can get the set of four boxes for $30 and the set of four posters for $49 and if you have played video games in the 1980’s, then this will speak to you. If not, it looks ridiculous is all I have to say. panic.com/blog. It’s really, really strange. I don’t know if either of you guys have played Burger Time on the old consoles or an old computer, this game where you were in a burger restaurant. You had to flip burgers and get them out to the customers in time but it looks like the poster art they’ve done for the Transmit application, it looks like Burger Time because there’s this crazed shift running around with files and folders. It’s very strange. Some of it looks like… I don’t know if you’ve seen movie posters for things like Tron, sci-fi movies in the 1980’s, it’s also very weird. Rainbow colors and pencil sketches of crazed faces, really weird stuff but worth checking out if you’re into artwork or retro computer software.

Patrick: I have a whole stack of Atari 2600 games about 10 feet from me in my entertainment center, so, you know.

Kevin: Really?

Patrick: Actually, I have the Atari 2600 out under my main TV right now next to my Wii. How many people can say that?

Kevin: That’s impressive. Does it work?

Patrick: Yeah. It’s actually not a 2600…

Kevin: Wow.

Patrick: I’m sorry. It’s a 7800, which allows it to play both the 2600 and 7800 games of which I have a copious amount.

Kevin: Well, then. You may be getting some Panic software posters for Christmas, Patrick.

Patrick: I’ll take it.

Kevin: That’s it for the show today but before we go, I wanted to mention the SitePoint Advent sale that we’re having right now. If you go to sale.sitepoint.com, every day leading up to Christmas, SitePoint has a different deal of the day for 24 hours only. As we record this on December 8th, we have the Web Design Business Kit 2.0 and Deliver First Class Websites: 101 Essential Checklists. Those two books normally, together, cost $286.95. Today, we’re selling them for $147.95 with free shipping no less. And this is one of our more expensive deals. We have cheaper ones as well. Go and check today whatever day you happen to be listening to this as long as it’s before or on December 24th, go to sale.sitepoint.com and see what we’ve got. We have run things like the entire SitePoint Video Library for $15 in past days, lots of deals to be had and plenty to look at. Go ahead and check it out and subscribe because if today’s deal isn’t for you, tomorrow’s might be and we send you an email out every day if you want to hear about what the deal of the day is.

Which brings us to the end of our show. Sign offs, guys?

Brad: I’m Brad Williams, WebDevStudios.com and you can find me on Twitter @williamsba.

Patrick: I am Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network, iFroggy.com. I’m on Twitter @ifroggy.

Kevin: And you can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint Podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on the show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. Email podcast@sitepoint.com if you have questions or comments for us especially leading up to Christmas. We are open to your ideas for what we should be doing different in the new year, if anything. If not, we’ll be bringing you more the same in 2010.

The SitePoint Podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #9: SitePoint at SXSWi
2. SitePoint Podcast #1: The Economy
3. SitePoint Podcast #5: The Principles of Successful Freelancing

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: December 4th, 2009. Twitter’s API Lead shares his thoughts on where the technologies we use to build the Web are leading. This is the SitePoint Podcast #39: Web Futures with Alex Payne.

Kevin: This is Kevin Yank for the SitePoint podcast in Perth for the Edge of the Web conference and I’m here with Alex Payne, one of the developers, in fact, the lead developer behind the Twitter API. Is that right?

Alex: Yep, that’s me.

Kevin: I guess a lot of people, when they get to meet you, they immediately think about the Twitter API and all the things that’s made possible; from your perspective, what does Twitter’s API mean to Twitter?

Alex: For us, it’s meant the flexibility to focus on what we do best or at least what we’d like to do best. It’s meant that over the last couple of years when we’ve been focusing on scaling the service and trying to add really high value features, things like lists that we just rolled out, that people have been asking for ages that we can dive in on the user experience and the performance of features like that and things that are a little bit more narrow or a little bit more nichey, developers can make use of the API and kind of build up those tools for themselves and for their users.

Kevin: So it enables the users to, in a sense, tell you by implementing things how it is they want to use the service.

Alex: Yes, definitely.

Kevin: So your talk was more general. It was really about where we’ve come from in web technology and where we may be going. One of the things you mentioned that really peeked my interest was that more and more web services like Twitter can and should explore an API-first methodology, that they can build their API and then “eat their own dog food,” you said, in building their web user interface. Would you say this is the approach that was taken at Twitter and can you think of any other examples where that sort of approach has worked?

Alex: Well, I’ve heard from folks on the Flickr team that that’s kind of how they’ve approached their architecture. It’s not the approach we took at Twitter. Our API kind of fell out of our user-facing application and if we could kind of do it all over again, I think I would rather have started from the API first in part because that’s been our primary source of traffic and in part because dealing with the issues of an API, the design issues, the performance issues kind of really shores up your thinking about your system.

Kevin: I’m a tech guy, what would you say is the technology mix at Twitter? I’m thinking not just the web languages you guys use, but I mean, are you all Mac people at Twitter?

Alex: For the most part, yeah. I think everyone now is running on Apple hardware, all of our engineers. We have a couple of people who boot into Linux day to day but for the most part, we’re all Mac folks.

Kevin: Cool. And you mentioned in your talk basically that at one point you were working on a pre-PowerPC Mac, so you must have been through the bad days of being a Mac user.

Alex: Yeah. I think that was a Performa 575 years and years ago and shortly thereafter, I had gotten my first Wintel hardware and went off into the land of Linux until OS X improved enough that people could actually use it.

Kevin: Okay, so you did move back and forth?

Alex: Yeah, and I’m glad I did. I mean I think like a lot of Mac folks, we all had that sort of crisis of faith for a few years and went off and learned Linux and it ended up being sort of a career asset, you know?

Kevin: Have your reasons for using the Mac today, are they different than the reasons you were using a Mac back then?

Alex: I mean back then it happened to be what was around the house. Today it’s more that nobody else has that kind of out-of-the-box, everything works experience and nobody else produces hardware of that quality which is just baffling. Like some days, I would actually prefer to be running on Linux so I could do weird things like run a tiling window manager but looking around at non-Apple hardware, nobody’s making good stuff even if you want to spend $2,500, it’s just really hard to get a nice machine.

Kevin: Yeah, one of the last Mac hold-outs at the SitePoint office, ironically, was our designer and recently, he just went out looking for a laptop and was not at all planning to get a Mac but he couldn’t find a good quality PC laptop and ended up buying a Mac for that reason.

Alex: Yeah, it’s really, really surprising. I don’t know what the Dells and Sonys of the world are thinking but it’s very odd.

Kevin: So one of the distinctions you drew when talking about the various web programming languages that are out there in the mix today is you distinguished between languages that are general purpose languages that are being used on the Web versus languages, like PHP and JavaScript, that were conceived for the Web, and you mentioned that there’s a tendency for these made-for-the-Web languages to have a shorter life span. Why do you think that is?

Alex: Well, not necessarily a shorter life span but at least that they tend to be kind of roundly criticized. People have complained for years about PHP encouraging bad development habits and being a very haphazardly designed language and people have complained about JavaScript having this object model that’s very different than most of the rest of the programming language world and having oddities and that sort of thing.

Kevin: Speaking of oddities, we’ve got some noise happening here, but go on.

Alex: So I think the part of the reason for that is the folks who’ve worked on more general purpose languages have had to satisfy users in a variety of different fields. They have academic users, scientific users, people building desktop software, people building server site software, and I think it kind of rounds a language out, it forces like Guido van Rossum’s or the Matz’s of the world to kind of expand beyond their initial concept of the language and figure out how do we improve the API’s, how do we improve the core libraries, that kind of thing. If a language is targeted at the Web and it has this more narrow audience, I think you never see that kind of cross-communication between programmers and different disciplines. Like PHP got a lot better when you could first start using PHP for client side or, sorry, for like command line scripting and that sort of thing. Suddenly, the language felt a little bit more robust and now I think JavaScript is going through that process as well now that people are using things like the Rhino JavaScript virtual machine for doing server side coding. It seems like they’re rethinking the language and kind of improving it.

Kevin: So the more use cases the stronger the language tends to get.

Alex: Seems that way, yeah.

Kevin: On that point, and this is something you mentioned also in your talk that on the Web it seems like the best technology isn’t always the one that wins, and this is something that Mark Pilgrim brought up this week when looking at old list posts about the <img> tag and how that ended up being the chosen option for HTML. Is this a problem on the Web that things that are evolved within just the context of the Web aren’t always the technically superior solutions and is this getting worse or better?

Alex: I don’t know. I go back and forth on this. I mean it’s kind of age old debate in technology, it goes back to Guy Steele “worse is better” kind of stuff. I think where it’s useful on the Web is that we’re going through such a constant period of evolution, kind of sloughing off the old skin, that if the technologies we’re using today are a little bit flawed, it’s easier to make the migration to the next set of technologies. If we had perfect solutions or solutions that even covered like the 80% or 90% case, it would be much harder every three or four years to kind of reinvent the Web, reinvent how we do all this.

Kevin: Another issue you touched on in your talk was that we’re moving into this age where rather than learning languages, more and more people are learning frameworks built on top of languages and the cost that comes with that. How do you, as a programmer, personally guard yourself against those costs? How do you hedge your bets? What’s your approach to that?

Alex: What I’ve tried to do over the last several years is, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of my day job working in Ruby on Rails, which has been, for the most part, incredibly productive, we’ve just gotten a ton of work done in that framework at Twitter, but outside, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about other programming languages, trying to look at problems outside of the web space, and particularly problems that are a little bit lower level so that it kind of balances out. You have that very high level framework-orientated thinking where you’re just focused on “how do I accomplish these business goals for the Web in as little time as possible?” It’s one way of thinking, but then saying how am I going to implement an entire programming language or even looking at problems in the security space that I used to work in. It just gives you a very different perspective.

Kevin: You as an API developer, a creator of an API, must have a unique perspective because people with so many different tools in so many different languages are consuming that API. So you have to build something that works naturally whether the consuming party is a Rails developer, a PHP developer?

Alex: Well, I mean, thankfully, since Twitter is more or less a RESTful API, there are conventions in most languages for dealing with RESTful web services, so we kind of get the benefit of all of that thinking.

Kevin: So you just finished up a book for O’Reilly about the Scala language, sell me on the Scala language.

Alex: Okay, so Scala in a nutshell: the advantages are that you’ve got object-oriented programming that everyone already knows and is comfortable with, you’ve got functional programming, which a lot of people have had a little bit of exposure to, but generally, they found that the syntax or the libraries in the functional language that you learned be a Lisp or Occam or Haskell or whatever were a little bit lacking. And the nice thing about Scala is that because it builds on the JVM and is completely interoperable with all those libraries, you can immediately take advantage of 10, 12 years of Java history. So we might think of Java as maybe not the sexiest language anymore but there’s a great collection of libraries that have been written over the years, people have been solving really hard problems in Java for a decade, and in Scala you can work in a beautiful language that looks a little bit more like Ruby or Python or something that more developers are comfortable in but you still get the benefit of all the JVM goodness.

Kevin: It sounds almost like it has some of the strings that made PHP such a success in that PHP, when it became popular was when they added the object-oriented features but they were optional. In the same way, Scala gives the functional programming stuff but you don’t have to leave behind all your skills and history.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I know a lot of people are interested in Erlang as kind of a first functional language, and Erlang is great and it’s particularly great for a kind of network service problems but it’s much more restrictive. Everything has to be immutable. So you assign a variable once, you can’t assign it again. It’s a very different way of thinking than we’re used to in a lot of OOP languages and it’s very specific about having this kind of odd Prolog-derived syntax and all the rest of it. With Scala, it’s a little bit more forgiving. The language leaves a little bit more up to the programmer about whether you want to work in an object paradigm or functional paradigm, whether you want to solve concurrency problems with the more Erlang-style actor model or whether you want to go back to traditional Java threading and that kind of thing.

Kevin: And because it’s on the JVM you have the freedom if you can build a particular module in Java and then use something like Scala to access it.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. Like if you’re working in a Java stack like Hadoop, you’ve got all the power of Hadoop available to you. You can just call into it seamlessly from Scala. Things like that are a big time saver.

Kevin: So, as you said, Scala is it runs on the JVM, what are your thoughts on the JVM as a platform? Clearly, it’s got many years behind it and it’s a solid, powerful foundation, but I don’t know, I’m not as confident in Sun as I used to be. Do you feel like the JVM has freed itself enough of Sun that if worst comes to worst and Sun was to collapse, would the JVM leave on in a satisfactory way?

Alex: I think so. I mean I was at the JVM Language Summit a few months back and I’m not a JVM expert by any stretch but it seems like between Sun and IBM and all the rest of the folks who are dependent on the Java Ecosystem that someone will pick up the JVM mantle. There’s too much good engineering in there and there’s now the OpenJDK project as well as other various JVM distributions. So I think there’s quite a lot of choice.

Kevin: In addition to functional languages, one of the other, sort of “stabs in the dark” predictions about the future you made was that service-oriented architectures are going to come into their own, the idea that we’re going to become comfortable enough building reusable components of software for the Web that we will start to be able to plug them together in consistent and standard ways. It seems this is just like functional languages we’ve always heard, “Oh, next year they’re really going to catch on.” These ideas of clean software components particularly in the Web, it always seems to be about one year away and then just as things settle down, the hand coders kick in with something new and exciting. For a while, their WYSIWYG seemed like it was almost going to be a reasonable way to work and then suddenly a CSS layout caught on and no, no, back to hand coding.

Alex: Yeah.

Kevin: Is there another wave of hand coding craziness coming that’s going to wash this SOA away?

Alex: It’s entirely possible, yeah. In fact, I think in some ways, the JVM language thing might spur that on a little bit. I’ve seen more and more of the programmers that I follow on Twitter pick up things like Clojure and people are building these micro-web frameworks in Clojure that kind of closely mirror what people have been doing in the Ruby community for the last couple of years and the whole approach is very like every project is very lightweight, very bespoke, you just sort of put this thin veneer on top of other libraries and hack something together and Lisp has sort of always encouraged that, that very, more sort of agile like playful development methodology rather than this big enterprisey SOA kind of thing. So if more and more programmers are jumping on that kind of bandwagon, then I think you’re absolutely right. We may see another wave “well, let’s just hack it together until it works and then move on to the next interesting problem.” That’s always a fundamental part of the hacker culture, right?

Kevin: I’ve one last question and it has to do with the idea that as web services, these services are being built and it seems like, especially in the case of things like Twitter, the non-web user interfaces— As you said, you found it easier to explain to your mom I think, how Twitter worked when it was a desktop client that looked like instant messaging rather than a web page. Are we ever going to get to the point where a web service will not need to have a web UI and it’s a pure web service and that the primary user interface isn’t in a web browser? I know Cameron Adams who’s one of the designers behind Google Wave was speaking about a month ago at Web Directions South and he said the most interesting challenge he had as the front end designer for the Wave web client was that he needed to make something that was good enough that would attract people to the Wave service but not so good that it would quash that market for third party non-web clients.

Can we get to the point where the web browser isn’t the most important thing for a web service?

Alex: Yeah, I certainly hope so. It seems like more and more of the destinations on the Web really have nothing to do with the Web. The Web is just incidentally the delivery vehicle but we’re not longer delivering hypertext. Like if you think about the Hulu video service that is quite popular in the US, I mean, it’s replacing TV for a whole demographic. That really has nothing to do with being on the Web. I mean you can kind of click around from one show to another but they very quickly delivered, I believe, an Adobe AIR based application maybe a few months, maybe a year after they had launched and for most of my friends, that’s their TV now. It’s running this Adobe AIR application that talks to Hulu and streams video. The web site is basically just you get registered on that and then they point you at the Adobe AIR app and that’s really the better way to interact with the service.

Kevin: I have to say here in Australia where we don’t get Hulu we’re all insanely jealous.

Alex: Do you guys have Spotify though?

Kevin: No, no, we don’t even have that here.

Alex: You don’t have Spotify? Yeah, so in the US it’s like the tradeoff is we have Hulu but we don’t have Spotify, but you guys are getting screwed.

Kevin: We get nothing.

Alex: But yeah, I think that’s absolutely going to be more of a trend and honestly, looking down the road at solving problems beyond Twitter, I’ve been working in the browser for the majority of my career and it’ll be really, really nice to get out of that model a little bit. I like web services, I like working on API’s and that sort of thing but it seems like mobile, rich clients on the desktop, all these kinds of stuff is exciting. There’s a lot to learn there.

Kevin: Alex is @al3x on Twitter and thanks for taking the time, Alex.

Alex: Thanks so much.

Kevin: And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview, please do get in touch.

You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom, and you can find me on Twitter @sentience.

Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave comments on this show and to subscribe to receive every show automatically. We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

Related posts:

1. SitePoint Podcast #23: Web Fonts with Jeff Veen
2. SitePoint Podcast #16: Online Marketing Inside Out
3. SitePoint Podcast #8: The Case For Web Apps

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Episode Summary

Here are the topics covered in this episode:

301Works Plans to Save Short URLs

• SitePoint Podcast #24: Those Frames are Ironic (SitePoint)
• 301Works.org
• SHORTURL FEUD: Tr.im Slams Twitter and Bit.ly, Goes Open Source (Mashable)
• URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation (Internet Archive)
• 310Works.org

Internet Explorer 9: Early Days

• An Early Look At IE9 for Developers (Microsoft)
• Channel 9 videos:
  • Standards & Interoperability
  • IE9’s New JavaScript Engine
  • GPU-accelerated Graphics in IE9

Proposed Standard for Resource Packages

• Making browsers faster: Resource Packages (Alexander Limi)

AOL Rebranding

• New Branding and Logos for AOL (SitePoint)
• Win $800 for redesigning the London 2010 Olympic Logo (SitePoint)
• AOL’s New Brand Identity Comes to Life in Animation (AOL)
• New Corporate Identity for Melbourne (SitePoint)
• ANZ Bank Rebrand – A Super Regional Bank? (Truly Deeply/Madly)

Are iPhone Developers Stupid?

• Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid. (QuirksMode)
• Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 Finally Ships (Rogue Amoeba)
• Apple’s Schiller Defends iPhone App Approval Process (Business Week)
• Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.2 Is Now Available (Rogue Amoeba)
• Native iPhone apps vs. Web apps (QuirksMode)
• iPhone Developers are not arrogant and stupid :) (Dion Almaer)
• iPhone Developers Aren’t Stupid, PPK (Faruk Ateş)

Host Spotlights:

• Stephan: I Love Charts
• Kevin: Support Details

Show Transcript

Kevin: November 27th, 2009. The Internet Archive comes to the rescue of short URLs; Microsoft provides a sneak peek at what’s coming in IE9; and AOL gets a new logo … or does it? This is the SitePoint Podcast #38: A Brain of Cats.

And welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. We have a shortage of hosts this week, just me and Stephan Segraves joining you today, but luckily, there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about, Stephan. We’ve got 301Works.org, the new AOL logo, some whisperings of what’s coming in Internet Explorer 9 and someone asking if iPhone developers are stupid—all that and more on the show today. But let’s start with the 301Works because it’s something we’ve talked about before way back in podcast 24, right, Stephan?

Stephan: Yep, we sure did. We talked about what’s going to happen if— tr.im, at the time, had gone away and the URLs had disappeared and 301Works.org has shown up and they have come up with a way, or have come up with a plan, I should say, to bring back the URLs or give us a historical archive of the URLs if something should happen to another URL shortening service.

Kevin: So to refresh the memories of our listeners, this all has to do with short URLs that have become popular because of Twitter—because Twitter limits the number of characters you can put in a message—and so the shorter the URL the better. So all these services like trim, like bit.ly, which is the market leader, let you create short URLs that redirect to long URLs. So, yeah, as you say, there’s concern and we saw it with tr.im. It almost shut down and at that time 301Works.org was something that had been dreamed up by bit.ly and trim in its death throes at the time, took a shot at 301Works. They called it “little more than a bit.ly public relations stunt.”

Stephan: I think they’re just angry about bit.ly being the Twitter’s de facto standard at the time.

Kevin: Yeah. I can’t say it was a very classy move. It got me wondering. I wondered if they were right that 301Works really was just a way of bit.ly saying everyone else is ‘fly-by-night’ and if anything goes wrong, we’ll take care of it for you.

Stephan: Well, it looks like this is actually moving forward, which is impressive. I mean they’ve got archive, what is it, Archive.org now behind it and they’re coming up with a plan, so I think it looks legitimate that they’re really trying to make this work.

Kevin: Maybe it was a public relations stunt at the time but it looks like it has come a long way and if it’s got the support of Archive.org, color me impressed. There’s this announcement on the Archive.org web site saying that the 301Works.org domain and that the responsibility for that has been handed over to Archive.org. So in the case of any URL shortening service that is a member of this working group; in the case that any one of these goes down or goes away or goes out of business, everyone who’s signed on to this has pledged to hand over the keys to their domain to Archive.org and meanwhile, Archive.org is keeping a running archive of all of these short URLs that are being created so that if they ever need to, if any one of these players goes out of business, Archive.org can take over responsibility for that domain and continue redirecting all those URLs for as long as necessary—which is forever, basically. So this is great.

Stephan: It is good news. It’s really good news. I was looking at the participating companies I don’t see tr.im on the list.

Kevin: No.

Stephan: And so it’s kind of like, “Well, everyone should be participating, why not?”

Kevin: Yeah, and trim at the time said— Well, bit.ly extended an olive branch, as they put it and said, “trim, if you’re going out of business, we’ll take care of you under the 301Works initiative,” and trim said, “Nuts to that. We’re just going to sell our service.” And if memory serves, they couldn’t find anyone willing to pay what it was worth without effectively spamming all the users of the service in return and so they went into business for themselves—or they open sourced it and promised that they would continue funding it for as long as necessary to keep it running. I’m not sure how well that’s working out for them.

Stephan: So that leads to the question of do you think this leads to us being more reliant on the URL shorteners—the services—or do you think we should still do it ourselves because we were having a discussion, should we do it ourselves or should we use a service. I was wondering what you thought about that.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a good question.

Stephan: I’m kind of like wanting to go back to bit.ly and just use bit.ly for everything now.

Kevin: I think, technically, the right approach is for people to shorten their own URLs using an open standard like the one that we saw that let you put a <link> tag in your pages saying ‘the short URL to this page is the following’, and that way, everyone’s responsible for maintaining their own URLs, it’s a sharing of the load. If your short URLs stop working, it’s because you fell asleep at the wheel, you didn’t care enough about keeping your content permalinked, but that doesn’t affect the internet as a whole.

Stephan: Gotcha.

Kevin: Unfortunately, on the Web, the best technical solution isn’t always the one that wins out. Sometimes it’s the one that’s the most convenient and so I think people will end up relying on services like bit.ly and the fact that Archive.org is stepping in… You know, Archive.org—this is the business they’re in. They’re in the business of preserving the history of the Web despite the fact that people are lazy and people will let their sites go away and giant sites like GeoCities will shut down because of financial concerns with no thought to the permanent record. So I think if we were all doing the right thing, if everyone chose the right course by history, then there wouldn’t be a need for Archive.org, but I think there is that need and I’m glad they’re there.

Stephan: Yeah, I agree.

Kevin: Interesting though at the very end of the Archive.org announcement, they provide a link to the 301Works web site and it’s a typo–they put a link to 310Works.org. So someone clever jumped on that and put a site up at 310Works.org with some Google ads on it but they were nice enough to actually write on this web site about URL shortening, about why it’s a risky thing and why the 301Works initiative is a good one and they then provide a link to the actual 301Works site. I’m quoting here. They say, “310Works.org is absolutely not the organization that’s needed. In fact, it is a pathetic, confusing, and cheap for-profit-please web site that aims to take advantage of an honest and simple typo. These guys are douches. If however, you really are interested in the longevity of shortened URLs, we suggest you visit 301works.org.” So they have a sense of humor about themselves and that’s great.

Stephan: That was nice of them to give a link.

Kevin: Yeah. Next thing we’re looking at is Internet Explorer 9. We joked about Internet Explorer 9 in my recordings that I did at Web Directions South a couple of months back. One of the attendees there was smart-cracking that was he was really excited about on the web at the moment was Internet Explorer 9, which at the time didn’t even exist. But now Microsoft has come out and provided a sneak peek at what they’re working on for Internet Explorer 9 and what especially interested me in this case is that they’re actually calling it Internet Explorer 9. At this point in the development of IE 7 and IE 8, they said, “Yeah, the marketing people haven’t made a final decision on what it’ll be called so we can’t call it anything other than the next version of Internet Explorer.” So we started calling it IE Next. But it seems like they’ve lightened up or at least they already know that it’s going to be Internet Explorer 9 when they’re done with it, but yeah, here we have on the Internet Explorer blog a look at what’s coming. Stephan, correct me if I’m wrong but you weren’t too impressed by this.

Stephan: No, I mean I don’t use Internet Explorer to begin with, but the first thing that I saw was the lack of ability to pass the Acid3 Test—just caught my eye—and I’m like oh…

Kevin: Yeah, they’re bragging about the fact that their current internal build has achieved 32 out of 100 on the Acid3 Test.

Stephan: Maybe they just haven’t got around to the other 68, I don’t know.

Kevin: And I say bragging. I say bragging and that’s a loaded term so I could be seen as accusing them of pounding their chests and saying, “Look how great Internet Explorer is,” and I hate to make that implication but that’s really how a lot of this blog post reads. It’s written in this tone of, “Here are the amazing things that are coming in Internet Explorer 9. We’re going to have better support for the Acid3 Test,” where browsers like Opera now have released a version that passes Acid3, 100 out of 100. “We’re going to have support for CSS rounded corners,” hallelujah!

Stephan: Finally.

Kevin: Finally but that’s not impressive. That’s, “Wow, at last, you got around to it!” sort of thing.

Stephan: It’s a little bit of cheerleading; I think is what I what I see.

Kevin: It is a bit of cheerleading and I am wondering if Microsoft feels that they have earned the right to cheerlead their browser, whereas in the Internet Explorer 7 timeframe, that entire release, they were hat in hand. They were, “We’re really sorry. We know we screwed up by stopping development on Internet Explorer. Please take Internet Explorer 7 as a token of our apology in this matter.” IE8, they were kind of like, “Yeah, we’ve addressed the most important issues for developers and this is a big step forward in bringing Internet Explorer closer to the competition and catching up on the stuff that we fell behind on.” I’m not seeing a lot of that contrite tone in what they’re talking about in IE9. They’ve posted three videos on the Channel 9 web site, which is kind of a Microsoft developer outreach community site and their interviews with the engineers that are working on this showing off demos of the stuff; and they’re continually saying throughout the video “it’s very early days”. Its’ clear, this is not the complete feature set or the final performance of what we’re going to see in Internet Explorer 9. I think it’ll be interesting to count the number of times they mention the fact that this is an early build, this is early days, we’re just getting started here—this is just a taste of what’s to come.

Stephan: Well, I wonder if this is kind of like the positive marketing spin that we’ve seen kind of with Windows 7 where they’re trying to meet the Apple, “We’re positive—we’re doing good things,” standard and they’re not trying to be negative or making up for something that they’ve done wrong in the past. That’s kind of what it comes off to me as. They want to be— “We’re doing something cool. This is new.” They want to be out there and that’s fine as long as their product actually delivers on what they’re promising.

Kevin: What they’re promising so far isn’t a lot. They say that Internet Explorer 9 will have JavaScript performance on par with Firefox 3.7. And for those not keeping track, Firefox 3.6 is currently in beta, 3.7 is kind of a next alpha version that’s coming; and one of the biggest things it has in it is an enhanced JavaScript engine. So IE 9 is aiming to match Firefox 3.7’s JavaScript performance and they say that will bring them much closer to the industry leader, Chrome and browsers like…

Stephan: Safari.

Kevin: Like Safari are also quite fast in the JavaScript stakes. So they’re not aiming to match the leader of the pack, they’re aiming to catch up with the next one.

Stephan: The stragglers.

Kevin: Yeah, the last of these stragglers. They also say they’re working on passing the Acid3 Test although they’re not making any promises there. They demoed CSS rounded corners and they mentioned that they’ve got a lot of new support for CSS 3 Selectors. So congratulations on all that stuff. We’re eagerly anticipating news of what else is going to be in IE 9. So far we’re nodding along but we’re not that impressed.

The other big thing that they mentioned was enhanced rendering performance using Direct2D. So rather than using the slow API that is used to draw buttons and menus and text labels in the Windows user interface—which is GDI—they are moving something closer to the Direct3D, hardware-accelerated 3D rendering engine, only this is a 2D version of that. So they’re going to be using the brains and power of your computer’s graphics processor to smooth out the rendering of fonts and texts and animations within Internet Explorer 9. And I think we’ve seen a lot of similar work from Apple because they rely so much on their Safari rendering engine to provide smooth animations in user interfaces throughout their operating system and to some extent, on the iPhone. That technology is key to Apple’s flagship polish—or Apple’s noted polish in the user experience—and so it’s clear that Microsoft has taken note and they’re trying to bring the same sort of thing to Internet Explorer 9 so that animated web applications will look just as smooth in IE 9 as they do in other browsers. The demo they showed showed just a piece of text slowly getting bigger, and how in IE 8 it kind of gets bigger one whole pixel at a time and therefore it’s kind of a jumpy animation, whereas the Direct2D has sub-pixel rendering and so it’s a very smooth, cinematic experience. It’s all good stuff but I think we agree there’s a lot more work to be done for Internet Explorer to be considered the leader in the market again.

A browser that’s doing more interesting work in advancing the leading edge of web technology is Firefox and there’s this proposal that I caught sight of earlier this week and it’s a proposal for resource packages. This is clearly a proposal that’s supposed to attract the attention of other browser makers and eventually lead to a standard but this is something that’s being implemented in Firefox 3.7 again and they say, “What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the resources that are used on every single page in your site—CSS, JavaScript, images, anything else—in a single HTTP request at the start of the first visit to the page? This is what resource package support in browsers will let you do.”

Stephan, have you ever had to worry about performance issues that come as a result of static things like CSS, JavaScript—all those requests bugging down the browser?

Stephan: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean sometimes I’ll be sitting there loading something and it will take longer than what I would expect for my high bandwidth connection to load and it’s not even the connection. It’s actually the browser is having trouble parsing it all out really quickly. So it’s a mixed thing. My connection is slow and then my browser is slow, at the same time. I do have that problem and this sounds like a great way to get around that to me. It sounds like its common sense.

Kevin: For a couple of years now, Yahoo! have really been pushing this agenda that if you want to speed up your sites, you don’t need to focus exclusively on the speed of your PHP page rendering—that a lot of headway can be made just by minimizing the number of files that your browser needs to request to display a page—and that a lot of the waiting time when you’re loading a web page is the browser making its initial connection, and also, browsers tend to put limits on how many things they’ll download at once from a given web site. So if you’ve got 20 files that need to be loaded for your homepage, your typical browser is only going to download, say, four of them at a time and then move on to the next four and then the next four and as a result, that time adds up. And so tools like YSlow—which is a plug-in for Firebug and it spots performance issues that are visible from the client side of your site—they’ve put heavy emphasis on pointing out when you’ve got multiple CSS files, when you’ve got multiple JavaScript files and how these things can be combined into one. And if you really want to take this to extremes, you can do something called CSS Sprites where you try and combine all of the images on your page into a single big image that has them all sort of pasted side by side, and then you use CSS to only display the portion of that master image in each spot on your site so that the browser’s only downloading one image but you’re displaying different parts of it in different parts of your page. I don’t think that’s something your average web site needs to worry about, but if you are a massive media site, if you’re CNN.com or something like that, this kind of work can really make a huge difference to the performance your users see.

And it looks like the person who wrote this proposal had something to do with YouTube because they point out the need, for example, that YouTube is constantly displaying thumbnails of related videos down the side and those dynamically generated thumbnails—it’s a different combination of thumbnails for every page on YouTube and as a result, they can’t do clever things like CSS Sprites in order to save load time.

And it’s nice and backwards compatible. The idea is you make a web page just as you would before but then you put a <link> tag again–a magical <link> tag–at the top of your page that says, “Before you start downloading any of the CSS, JavaScript, and images referenced in this page, download this one file first and this file is a ZIP file, which contains as many of these static resources as you can fit in there.” It downloads this one file, it figures out where all of these files are linked from—where they belong in your site—and then as it processes your page and it sees an image that it would load otherwise, it goes, “Oh, I’ve already got that from the resource package. I don’t need to download it again.” And so at an extreme, you can download a whole web page with two HTTP requests: one for the web page and one for the resource package.

Stephan: It seems like it’s a great idea, right? I wonder why we haven’t been doing this before. The only thing I wonder about is the ZIP file and security things that. Do you think anything about that or do you think I’m kind of… I was just wondering. We see cross-eyed scripting, things that were people have gone and they’ve gone and done things behind the scenes and that seems like something that if someone figured out a way to put a harmful ZIP file there or change the path for that ZIP file—that we could see something that’s infecting people’s machines, maybe, or browser. I don’t know. I’m just thinking outside the box.

Kevin: Yeah. I don’t quite see it because it’s downloading the ZIP file just as it would download any other things, so if you can replace that ZIP file, you can already wreak a whole lot of havoc. It might be a way of compromising a site in a way the developer might not notice right away. I can see that. The developer goes and looks at it as JavaScript file and goes, “Well, looks fine to me. I can’t see anything wrong with my site,” but meanwhile, the hacker has replaced the ZIP file with a version that contains a malicious copy of that JavaScript file. So I could kind to see that but I don’t think it’s a real risk here. The biggest risk I see here—it’s not a security one, and we mentioned it earlier—that I don’t think the technically correct approach always wins on the Web. I suspect this is one of those things that looks great on paper, solves all the problems, but is any real world developer actually going to go to the trouble of creating these resource packages and keeping them up-to-date whenever they make changes to the files on their site?

Stephan: Well, it seems like it’s a much more compact way of managing a site. To me, it makes sense even if I’m— I’m not a developer, I’m not a CSS developer, but if I was trying to organize my site into a single file, it seems that that makes sense. We already use tools—like I use Coda—and I already use that tool to organize my site. This seems like this would be a great way to just have a plug-in for Coda and package it all up and ZIP it up and upload it–when I’m done editing.

Kevin: Okay, yeah. If the development tools start generating these resource packages automatically, that would be pretty cool, I have to say.

Stephan: I think that’s a long ways off though. I think since we’re still on paper here, first you’ve got to get the browsers to pick it up. Are they going to really want to write the browser to do this?

Kevin: Well, Firefox is leading the way. They’re going to put this in and I guess see how it works and it’s nice that it’s backwards compatible. So just for the sake of argument, let’s say every browser implemented it except one—and I’m not pointing any fingers here—it would make the sites a lot faster on the browsers that did support it, and those that didn’t support it would continue to download the static files the normal way. So yeah, it’s good in that way; the backwards compatibility I applaud. I mean if you were able to drop this backwards compatibility issue, you could quickly make this even more effective by just—you know in Internet Explorer when you save a web page, it gives you the option of saving it as a single file like a compiled web page file that contains everything in it?

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: You could put up web pages in that format on the web or something open source and similar but right now, this proposal is talking about cutting it to two requests per page for a fully optimized page, but the natural thing to ask is why don’t you just cut it back to one—make it a single file that contains everything—and then you lose that backwards compatibility because older browsers won’t be able to read those single page packages or those single file packages. So yeah, looking forward to seeing this implemented and for tools to start getting on board as well. I think that is a really important point. CSS Sprites, for example, is really a case of taking extreme measures for performance and the reason for that is there are no tools for automating it. It is a labor intensive thing to do.

Stephan: Yep and if you can take out the labor part of this, then there’s a little bit of an incentive besides just performance, it’s also organization. So it makes sense.

Kevin: AOL is re-branding and it seems like they’re re-branding because Time Warner is splitting them off. After absorbing them several years ago—I’m not sure exactly when—AOL has been operating as a part of Time Warner and it’s being split off into its own company. It’s going to be a content company now. They’re no longer focusing on providing internet access or a richer internet experience. They’re focusing on creating content for the Web. Welcome to the club, guys. And they’ve got a new set of logos, a new brand, and the yellow running man is nowhere to be seen.

Stephan: So does this mean I have to throw away my 4,000 hours? Are those CDs useless now?

Kevin: Yeah. I think they’ve been useless for awhile just between you and me. The logo is kind of a non-logo. It’s really interesting. It’s not so much a logo as a branding approach. So they’ve got the letters A-O-L and the A is still upper case but the O, L are lower case, Aol. So like a word, “Aol” and you can’t really tell if the L is a capital I or not. So it kind of looks like AoI as well, and then a period, a full stop at the end and that’s the logo—and it’s white. So it this logo appears on a white piece of paper, it’s going to be invisible. The idea is, the logo, the text becomes visible by having it against a colored background, a picture, a dynamic image of some kind and the samples they show on the logo announcement have it against a gold fish, against a hand giving the “Rock!” sign, a swirly sort of blue ink thing, some scribbles of various colors and I can’t even make out with that last one is—it looks like someone’s brain made of cats. Use your imagination. But you weren’t too impressed by this?

Stephan: No. From my understanding, this is actually done by the same company that did the 2012 London Olympics logo.

Kevin: Oh dear.

Stephan: Which if you haven’t seen that is also a piece of work, if I do say so myself.

Kevin: I’m surprised they’re still getting work.

Stephan: If you haven’t seen this, you have to go see it. It’s like bright pink and purple.

Kevin: I have to say I like this a lot better than the 2012 logo.

Stephan: Oh, yeah. This is better. Maybe that’s how they got the work, I don’t know.

Kevin: There’s a video version that’s nice and again, they’ve just got that white text but it’s being revealed by interesting videos, paint of two different colors splashing together in the center of the screen to reveal the AOL text that was there all along but it was invisible against the white background. The last one is especially funny—it’s some sort of high impact dance move because it’s a guy standing in the middle and his two friends run up to him and step on his chest and his back as they do a flip in the air at the same time. It’s all very exciting.

Stephan: I think the video was really cool. What bothers me is the logos that they’ve shown that are still logos. I mean, they’re not logos. What bothers me is they almost look like they’re print—like they should be on like a newspaper because they’re grainy, it doesn’t look refined, it just kind of looks like this threw some crappy fonts…

Kevin: Stock photos.

Stephan: …yeah, on a stock photo. But the video is, like you said, is cool. It’s neat, it’s kind of modern. I like that.

Kevin: A subtle thing that’s going on in the photo versions at the very least I like is that the white Aol text is never completely revealed by the picture that’s behind it. There’s always sort of a piece of the letter A or a piece of the letter L that’s sticking out over the edge of the photo and connecting with the white background and so the text sort of feels like it’s pulling air into the photo. Do you see what I mean? It keeps that connection with the wide open white space?

Stephan: Yeah. It’s like infinite even though it’s connected. Yeah, I see that.

Kevin: I like it. I’ve seen recent re-brandings, the city of Melbourne, the ANZ Bank—the Australian New Zealand bank down here in Australia—we’ve had a couple of high profile new rebrandings happening and both of those are right up there with the 2012 Olympics. They’re pretty horrendous and I will congratulate AOL for their creativity and for creating something interesting here, but no one seems particularly blown away by this.

Stephan: There’s not a lot of fondness for it.

Kevin: Well, what it lacks is a clear visual brand like something that you’re going to recognize at a great distance driving down the freeway as you see it on a billboard. The brand that they’ve created is a non-brand here. It’s something that you’re going to have to squint and discover anew every time you see it.

Stephan: That’s a good way to put it. Yeah, it’s not like a font that you know right off the bat as AOL or it’s not the bold letters like we used to see with the running man, it’s none of that; so you really got to think about if for a second. When I first saw it I was like, “What kind of one-sentence word is that?”

Kevin: Yeah.

Stephan: What kind of one-word sentence is that, sorry.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly, AOL.

Stephan: AOL.

Kevin: Or it’s not even AOL. It’s Aol.

“Are iPhone developers stupid?” asks Peter-Paul Koch. In fact, his initial blog post didn’t even ask it. He just came out and said it. “Apple is not evil. IPhone developers are stupid.” And this has to do with something that we haven’t actually mentioned in the podcast before. It’s been on our radar and that’s the furor surrounding the process that an iPhone developer has to go through to get their application approved for sale in the Apple App Store. Without going over every single example because we’d be here all day, there are many examples of developers who’ve put in months of work in some cases on an app, spent thousands if not millions of dollars in development and preparing their marketing push for launch day and then they put this app to Apple and Apple goes, “Nah. Rejected. Rejected because it will confuse users,” and they’re rarely more specific than that.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s pretty bad in my opinion. I’m kind of more on the side of Apple choose to open the store and just monitor it for people who are sending out bad apps or apps that are dangerous to the phone rather than choosing which apps get on the store and which apps don’t. I don’t know. It seems like it’s counter-intuitive.

Kevin: I’m going to make a big bet here because this thing seemed to be coming to a head. We’re at the point in the past week— did you see the Airfoil debacle?

Stephan: I did not.

Kevin: Well, Airfoil is this application for the Mac and for Windows, but mainly Mac users use it and it’s this app that lets you grab the audio from any application on your computer or all the audio for your computer and transmit it either to another computer running their free Airfoil Speakers application, or to an AirPort Express or an Apple TV and these devices have built-in music streaming capabilities so you can send music from iTunes. Well, Airfoil lets you send it from any application to these devices and they have an application Airfoil Speakers for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This app has been on the App Store for almost a year now if not longer and it just lets you receive this stream of audio from any computer running Airfoil. And no problem, you might think, and the 1.0 application has been very successful for them and Apple approved it and kept it in the App Store and then shortly after they found a few bugs so they wanted to release version 1.0.1.

Well, what happens is with the App Store, you have to submit updates as a new application to be approved and Apple denied that update. Even though it contained some critical fixes to an application that Apple had previously approved and continued to keep in the App Store after they rejected 1.0.1 and the reason they rejected it is because at a glance, Airfoil Speakers contained images of Apple hardware. So if you were receiving audio from an iMac, it would show a picture of an iMac in the Airfoil Speakers application. But what was happening was that they were using Apple’s own APIs to provide these images. The Airfoil application running on the iMac would say, “I need to send a picture of this computer to the receiving end to let them know what this computer looks like.” And so they ask Mac OS X. They say, “Mac OS X, you’ve got a documented way for me to get a picture of the computer I’m running on, can you give me that picture?” And Mac OS X gives it that picture and they send it to Airfoil Speakers and Airfoil Speakers displays it.

So this is a feature in Apple’s operating system that Apple provides and yet when Airfoil Speakers used it, Apple rejected that application for the fact that they were using images of Apple hardware–even though they had previously approved a version of the application that did the exact thing, that just had more bugs in the application.

Stephan: Yeah, it’s backwards. That’s backward.

Kevin: So like I said, we could talk all day telling these stories—and this is a typical one—but things are coming to a head because in response to this, the company behind Airfoil, which is Rogue Amoeba, they posted a big blog post explaining how they finally got their application approved by stripping out all of the images of Apple hardware or stripping out the code that was displaying those images and they got Apple to approve it six months or something after they originally submitted it to Apple. As a result, they are giving up on iPhone development and there have been a few high profile developers who’ve taken this stance that iPhone development is just too hard because Apple’s draconian App Store approval proces—its black box nature—the fact that you can’t predict reliably whether something you’ve written is going to be approved by Apple or not. The rules are vague and their enforcement is inconsistent.

So developers with greater and greater profiles have been walking away from the iPhone platform and Apple started doing something about it. Phil Schiller, one of the big muckety-mucks at Apple was speaking to Business Week this week and said that they’re working on these very problems and in fact, Apple turned around and got in touch with Rogue Amoeba as a result of their blog post and said, “Look, you were right, we were wrong, submit yet another version of your app that brings those icons back, those images of Apple hardware back, and we’ll approve it right away.” And they did. They approved it within 24 hours, within one working day.

So Apple is doing stuff about this but I don’t think their position can hold. The more people that they concede to as a result of angry blog posts, the more angry blog posts they’re going to get and I’m betting that within 12 months Apple is going to have to lift the restriction on iPhone applications that makes it so that applications can only be installed from the iTunes App Store.

Stephan: You think so?

Kevin: I think they’ll continue to keep the App Store closed and requiring Apple approval but if you want to distribute your app another way, just put it up on your web site so that people can click on it in mobile Safari and download it and install it. They actually support this now but they really put strong restrictions on it so it can only be used for beta programs by developers. I think there’s a limit on the number of copies of an application that can be distributed this way using ad hoc distribution but I think they’re going to be forced to open that up.

Stephan: See, I think I disagree because this is a moneymaker for them. I mean, the App Store, they get a percentage of the pie. So I don’t see them wanting to give that up completely.

Kevin: But I think the App Store will continue to be the most convenient way for a developer to make money off of their iPhone app. I think if they want to sell it and they don’t want to go through all of the pain of setting up an ecommerce web site to buy it and trying to get people to come and discover their app… Developers will continue to submit stuff to the App Store because it’s the easiest way to make money on the iPhone platform.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: But if you want to do something that Apple isn’t quite happy with or won’t approve for one reason or the other, I think they will provide that alternative and so Apple will then be justified in saying, “Look, it’s our store, we can put what we want in it and what we don’t want in it and if you’re not happy with our policies, start your own store.”

Stephan: I guess the Apple Store could become an exclusive place for your apps. It could become the target of apps.

Kevin: It’s the boutique. And finally, Apple could throw away all the fart applications and all the gross-out apps that I think everyone agrees are in poor taste but because there’s no rule-breaking going on in these applications, that Apple can’t deny them.

Stephan: Yeah. Well, I did see a Cha-Ching app that got rejected because it was too simple. You just hit the button and “Cha-Ching!” That’s all it did and it was rejected. There was a guy who made a video about it.

Kevin: Too simple.

Stephan: I’ve never heard that before.

Kevin: Wow. During the elections, there were apps that all they did was display the logo of the political party that you supported.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: It was like the image application. That’s all they did is display an image when you started them up.

Stephan: I think it’s because they don’t have internal standards. I think that they give people some vague rules and these people just interpret them however they want and that’s why you get this disparity. But this article…

Kevin: Anyway…

Stephan: Oh sorry. We’ve gone off topic.

Kevin: Way off topic.

Stephan: The article that talks about that the iPhone developers are stupid because they should be taking advantage of the web side of the iPhone and the Safari browser and WebKit and all that, and saying that you should use that instead of it—and you don’t have to worry about the App Store at all. And he actually comes back and he wrote another post, I guess, a follow-up to this kind of saying that he was wrong, whatever, but…

Kevin: So yeah, he said if iPhone developers aren’t happy with the App Store (and why would you be), you should just build the web app because web apps can be icons on the iPhone home screen just like native applications can but they’re not subject to any rules or restrictions whatsoever. If you can build a web site, you can build an application for the iPhone and Apple can’t do anything about it. And that was his initial point—IPhone developers are stupid, they are drinking the Kool-Aid. Apple tells them to build native apps and so they build native apps. Dion Almaer of Palm, previously Mozilla and Faruk Ateş, they both wrote strongly-worded posts saying that, “Yeah, you’re not quite right there, PPK”—Peter-Paul Koch was the author of the original article—the reason people build native apps for their iPhone is that web apps aren’t quite there yet. They don’t provide full access to the hardware features that you get on the phone and they don’t provide the same level of user experience—the sleekness of the experience, the integration in the iPhone platform—all those things aren’t quite as polished in a web apps for the iPhone and the reason someone buys an iPhone is because of the polish. And so if you want to stand out on the iPhone platform, you do it with a native app.

Stephan: I have to say this. I’ve used the Flickr application on the iPhone and I’ve also used the web site, and the web site’s darn good. I mean the web site is cool. I mean it’s got location awareness and everything—like it can find photos that are around me.

Kevin: They did a beautiful job with that web application I have to say.

Stephan: Oh, they did. They did. And the app though itself—I think is terrible. It’s slow. It takes forever to load a picture. It takes forever to take a picture. It’s not smooth like what I was expecting it. I use the web app almost exclusively and never use the actual iPhone application.

Kevin: And it seems like because the application came so late, it seems like Flickr were planning on everyone just using their web app.

Stephan: Yeah.

Kevin: And that’s why it’s so good. And the reason the web app wasn’t quite enough is because it doesn’t provide that integration. You couldn’t— Using a web app, you can’t pick photos from your camera roll on your iPhone and upload them to Flickr—and they needed an application to do that. It looks like they did the minimum necessary to provide that picture but I think you’re right. The right way to view photos on Flickr on your iPhone is to use their mobile app.

Kevin: Facebook did something similar. Facebook’s mobile web site for a long time was a shiny example of a mobile web application looking like a native iPhone app, and in fact, the people behind it released their user interface framework so that other people could do the same sort of tricks. But eventually Facebook built their own native application just because they were able to provide an even sleeker, richer experience.

Stephan: My opinion on this is that people who build them are just trying to build a simple application to do some data entry or something for a web site that they have—it makes sense to just do a mobile iPhone version, not an app. But I think there’s some applications out there that deserves the application treatment. I’m a plane nerd for those listeners who don’t know. I’m a huge airplane nerd and I downloaded the LiveATC.net app so I could listen to air traffic control near my home airport; and it’s an amazing app. I mean the thing just streams over 3G air traffic control—and I can’t imagine them trying to do that through the mobile API. Just can’t.

Kevin: So PPK’s follow-up blog posts in response to the criticism he got, he’s basically saying, “I was wrong and yet there are things in my original post that I still think are worthwhile saying,” and this follow-up post I think is a must-read. It really is quite insightful. He’s calmed down and found the nugget of truth that got him angry enough to write the rant that was mostly nonsense. Sorry, PPK.

The follow-up post says, first of all, one of the really good reasons for building a native app for the App Store is it’s much easier to make money off of a native app than off of a web application. If you want to sell access to your web application that is custom designed for the iPhone, yeah, it’s going to be much easier to get it on to the device because you don’t have to have it approved by Apple, but getting people to find it, providing a convenient way for people to pay for it—compared to the App Store—there’s no competition there. On the iPhone, you click a link on a web page that points to the App Store, it says, “Do you want to install this? It will cost $0.99.” You say “Yes”, you have spent $0.99 and you’re done. The developer gets 70% of that. Doing that with other web application, you’re going to be dealing with PayPal at the simplest and providing that slick experience to install it, and then explaining to them how to get an icon on their home screen from within mobile Safari is a nightmare. So, making money: much easier using the App Store. Then there are all the issues with a device APIs, which is why Flickr ended up writing their own native app because if you want to hook in to certain features of the iPhone, you can’t do that with web apps yet. He says, “Look, that’s going to be solved. If Apple is not working on improving device integration with web apps, they’re fools,” and so he’s willing to bet on that becoming better in time, but right now he concedes it’s not quite there yet and so native apps have the edge.

Interoperability versus user experience is the big one. If your application calls for polish above all else—if your business goals require you to provide the most polished experience possible on a single device, the iPhone—then native apps are the way to go. However, if interoperability is an important thing on your radar, if being able to build an application that will work with little or no modification across lots of different devices—not just the iPhone—and you’re willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of user experience polish to get that interoperability—quadruple your market in exchange for slightly jerkier animations, for example. If that’s a reasonable trade off, then you should be building web apps and sacrificing the user experience polish that you get with the native APIs on the iPhone.

He closes with a discussion of the fact that it’s interesting that the market leaders in the mobile application space, which are Apple and Google—Apple with iPhone, Google with their Android platform—have bet on native apps or at least a custom software development kit with new languages and new frameworks to build applications specifically for their devices. Whereas the market trailers—the Palms, the Microsofts—they’re all betting on open web technologies, whether it’s actually building web sites that display as applications on the phone or in the case of Android, they just built an SDK that requires web developers to use their existing skills to build native apps for the phone. The market trailers are betting on web standards. And it’s clear: whenever you’re behind you bet on openness, you work together because that openness lets you team up against the market leaders and yet they’re not doing a very good job of developer outreach. They’re betting on these technologies that thrive on the web developer community and then they’re not engaging with that community or at least they haven’t been very good at it so far. So he expresses his frustration there. Great article I think. Really insightful on many fronts and I’m glad he backed down from his extreme initial position in order to give us those insights.

Let’s close off the show with just a couple of host spotlights this week.

Stephan: Yeah. So I’ll go first. I’m a big data visualization fan. I love charts–they just fire me up.

Kevin: I love them too. The info graphics that you get in newspapers are really, I geek out on those when they’re well-done.

Stephan: Yeah. So I found this web site, it’s on Tumblr. It’s ilovecharts.tumblr.com. They’ve got a bunch of charts of mixed things. Some of them funny, some of them really cool where we are debt-wise, things like that—just random charts. Some of them may be inappropriate, I don’t know but there’s some really good ones—things from the Washington Post, they’ve collected all of them and put them in one place. So it’s a neat little read, ilovecharts.tumblr.com.

Kevin: Yeah. I’m just scrolling through here, sorry. I’ve got distracted already. My host spotlight is a site called Support Details and you can find it at supportdetails.com. The tagline on the site is “tech support anger management” and it’s when someone tells you your site isn’t displaying right in their browser and then you inevitably get into that email back and forth where you’re like, “Well, what browser are you using?” “Oh, I’m using Internet Explorer.” “Well, which version of Internet Explorer?” “Oh, IE 8 I think.” “Okay, what version of Windows are you on? What is your screen resolution? Is your browser window maximized or not?” And next thing you know you’ve sent six emails back and forth and then you realize it’s because they have JavaScript disabled in their browser. This site saves you all of that time because if someone tells you they’re having a problem with their site, you just say, “Okay, go to SupportDetails.com, fill in your name, your email address, and my email address, and click ‘send details’ and you get an email with their operating system, their screen resolution, the web browser and version they’re using, the size of their browser window, their IP address, their color depth, whether JavaScript is enabled, whether cookies are enabled, and the version of Flash that they’re using. And this will save so much time! I’m really happy I keep a link to this on my desktop because…

Stephan: Sounds useful to me.

Kevin: Great site. If you are ever responsible for trying to figure out why your site isn’t displaying quite right in one obscure browser configuration on the other side of the planet, use supportdetails.com. It’s free and it’s very nicely designed too.

Our signoffs also will be short this week. Stephan?

Stephan: Yep. My name is Stephan Segraves, you can find me on badice.com and my Twitter is @ssegraves.

Kevin: You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom on Twitter. Visit us at http://www.sitepoint.com/podcast for all the new shows and to subscribe using iTunes or whatever podcast listening software you have to get every show automatically.

This episode of the SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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