Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 17, for Friday, June 12th, 2009: “12 Kinds of Awesome”.

Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast, news, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined by my panel of co-hosts.

Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.

Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network.

Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.

Kevin: Hello again. We’re back with another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. Today, we are without Brad. Brad is celebrating his birthday and he has chosen his birthday party over the podcast. I don’t think I need to comment on that; I think our listeners will judge him as harshly as I have so let’s just move on.

All: (laughter)

Patrick: Hopefully, he’ll be back again in the future.

Kevin: Yes. Well, we do miss you Brad and happy birthday, seriously man. 

On the show today, we’re talking – well, it’s been a huge two weeks and our last episode was an interview, so we’ve got some news piling up. We’ve got everything that came out of Google I/O, their big developer conference a couple of weeks ago, so we’ll be talking Google Wave, Google Maps, etc. We’ve got a new beta of Opera 10 that’s out that is definitely worth checking out. We’ve got Microsoft Bing, their new search engine and the API that goes along with that for developers, and we’ve got new portable devices from Palm and Apple with their new iPhone. It’s all over the map and we’re just going to dive in because I think I could fill a show just introducing these topics. 

First up today we have Google Wave. Guys, did you all look at the hour-long or 45-minute long demo from Google I/O.

Stephan: What do you think, Kevin?

Patrick: Um, no. 

Kevin: I think that Stephan’s cup of tea, but I suspect Patrick, how much do you know about Google Wave?

Patrick: Well, I live near the beach. So, I have that. No, I know of what I’ve read as far as you know it being a tool for communication and collaboration and tying different communication mediums together in a seamless experience but that’s the end of my area.

Kevin: In the Tech Times last week, Andrew Tetlaw described it as “twelve kinds of awesome dressed up as ninja.” 

Patrick: That’s high praise.

Kevin: From Andrew that is very high praise. It’s difficult to explain without seeing the video and some of the coverage I’ve seen suggests that that is going to be Google Wave’s biggest challenge to overcome is the complexity of the service, but really they’re viewing it or pitching it as a replacement for email. So the idea is that instead of getting email, you would log into this Google Wave client and it’s both a tool for real-time communication and for collaborative document authoring. So you get these messages, you can add people to the conversation and then, in addition to replying to messages one after another like you do in email, you can also reply inline to individual paragraphs and you can edit things that other people have written in the conversation and Google Wave keeps track of who edited what and has a scrubbable timeline so you can rewind back in time and see who wrote what.

Patrick: So it sounds like Google Docs plus Google Chat plus Gmail plus wiki equals Google Wave. So who would use it?

Kevin: Throwing it into a big cauldron! Well, I know what Google’s answer would be; they would love to see everyone use this. 

Stephan: Everyone.

Kevin: And the idea is that everyone would find a different way of using this that suited them. In the demo, they even showed how it could be used as Twitter client. You could add the special Twitter user to your Google Wave conversation and suddenly all of the people that you subscribe to on Twitter, you would see their posts, their tweets in the Google Wave and if you reply to them in Google Wave, those generate Twitter replies on Twitter and so you can do all your twittering within Google Wave. And this was a recurring theme of doing things inside Google Wave and having Google Wave translate them into the events that these external systems would understand.

Stephan: I like this because now it’s going to let me centralize all my distractions into one place.

Patrick: How does it make money?

Kevin: How does it make money, I heard Patrick asked inevitably and I guess that’s the question. If it’s like Gmail then they’ll be showing ads. And at the end of the day, that’s the business that Google is in.

Patrick: Right so we just sort of like – I’m just trying to visualize. I just hooked up with Google Apps on my main domain to use it for email and so on and you know, is this something that is going to tie into those domain names or it is something that people will take and make a service that they’ll sell using it or is it something that will always be tied to Google?

Kevin: I think there is no doubt that if you have a Google Apps account or Google Apps for your domain or for your company, you’ll definitely see Google Wave appears a new icon in there, for sure, that goes without saying. But they made a point of saying that they were going to open source as much of the code as they possibly could, anything that wasn’t obviously, you know, the password handling stuff behind the scenes of Google, they probably won’t open source that but the vast majority of both the platform and the client, they were going to open source. They’ve also published all the protocols that go behind the scenes and they demoed, for example, how a third party could build their own Google Wave client and the one they demoed – they demoed a differently branded web client. They also demoed one that ran in a terminal at the command line. It looked liked that old Pine email client, if you remember that; only just like the web client, things appeared in real time as they were typed by other users so it was fully capable of using the Google Wave protocol. I assume it couldn’t show quite the level of rich text formatting but their point is that anyone could take the Google Wave client, remove the Google branding, put their own branding on, make changes to it, make it work in the exact way they want it to, and host it on their own servers. And behind the scenes, these servers work in a federated way so that Google Wave messages can go from one Google Wave service to another automatically and information is only shared with the servers that are participating in the conversation. So if your company has its own Google Wave server, anything that you’ll only share with your fellow company members never goes to anyone else’s Google Wave server, but things that you share with the public do. 

So they’ve got an answer for every question and I’m just here to repeat it back. Does the world need this, and if does, are people going to let go of email? I guess that’s what Google wants them to do, get them past email as the way to do all online communication and use something better.

Stephan: I don’t know. I don’t like … I don’t use Google Docs I should say first off. I have documents on it but I don’t use it heavily unless I’m sharing something and I just needed to give it to somebody, and I can’t the see need for me personally in the environment I work, without all my coworkers switching over to this, needing this tool that Google has created. I don’t see it. But maybe I’m missing something. It looks really cool and it looks really neat to be able to edit a document real time with bunch of different people but how many of us really need that? Not that many, I would say.

Kevin: Here at SitePoint we’ve talked about setting up an internal Laconica server which would do the same thing as Twitter, only it would be private, within the company at SitePoint, and that would cut down on some of these company wide emails asking who wants to go out to lunch today and replace them with this sort of back channel that people could check into and check out of depending on how busy they were during the day. So move the distractions out of this critical channel of communication. And I think now that we’ve seen Google Wave, I think we’re going to hold off and just set up a Google Wave when that comes out and it’s a more flexible tool for doing that kind of stuff.

Patrick: But would you guys use it for document modification? Could you see SitePoint using it that way?

Kevin: I could see authors submitting documents like articles and book chapters if they really wanted to write entire book chapters in Google Wave; I’m not sold that that’s ever going to happen but certainly, articles and even blog posts I could see being submitted and edited back and forth that way if the article author wanted to do it that way. I don’t think we’d be twisting anyone’s arm just yet.

Patrick: Gotcha. 

Kevin: Well, Google Wave wasn’t the only thing that Google was talking about at I/O. In fact, the Tech Times issue 242 is worth browsing if you want to see a more complete coverage of that. One of the other things they released was a version 3.0 of the Google Maps API. 

I’m looking at you, Stephan. You ever written to the Google Maps API?

Stephan: Not enough to really see the big deal with this besides the names base change, which I think is a good move. In my opinion, it’s a good move.

Kevin: Well, it looks to me like they just took a step back and redesigned the code. It doesn’t do a whole lot different but the JavaScript code that you write is a lot cleaner. Before you had to check if your browser was compatible with the Google Maps API before you did anything by calling the GBrowserIsCompatible function and they’ve gotten rid of a lot of that cruft and the code isn’t that much shorter but it seems more meaningful. Just for me as a JavaScript developer, the code looks prettier to work on and so I’ll be happier with that.

Patrick: Yeah and I was just reading through this post of the Google developer blog, one of the points that jumped out to me as a non-developer is that no keys are going to be required, so that would seem like it would free it up a lot and make it a lot easier for people to just plug and play with it, so to speak.

Kevin: Absolutely. Google seems to have been loosening the chains around this API steadily over time. The new API version 3 also runs in mobile Safari on iPhone and iPod touch devices and at the same time, just yesterday, Apple announced version 3.0 of the iPhone software which will include for developers a Google Maps component that they can imbed in their applications. So when we first had Google Maps come out, Google was really serious about “this cannot be used in commercial applications,” and now we’ve go Apple going “here’s a component, it does everything, you can sell applications that embed this in it.” It seems like Google was cautious to begin with but they’re realizing that the more this gets used, the better for them.

Stephan: Yeah and I noticed that – I’ve been playing with just Google Maps just recently on some different things and I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that they’ve changed the way it loads, just the map itself, the texture, layers and things, where it will load an intermediate layer, if you re on a slow connection. Because I’ve been on the road a little bit and the connection had been really slow and it will load an intermediate layer which it wasn’t doing before. It loading nothing or …

Kevin: What does that look like?

Stephan: It looks more grainy. It’s off-color. It’s much more grainy and ugly looking but it works, so you actually see a map before the whole thing load which is kind of nice.

Kevin: Wow that is nice. We can’t talk about Google all day here. Let’s move over to Opera and they’ve released the beta of Opera 10. We’ve spoken about Opera 10 before and covered some of the changes that were going on but the big change with this beta seems to be the user interface. They’ve taken some time to polish up the user interface. 

Patrick, I understand you’ve had a look this.

Patrick: Yeah, I’ve had played around it for a whole 5-10-15 minutes in preparation for the show.

Kevin: That makes you an expert.

Patrick: I am the show’s expert from the user perspective. I think it looks nice. They had Jon Hicks who’s a famous designer, of course, revamp the UI a little bit and it looks nice. It’s an attractive looking browser. I played around with it. It renders well. It seems to have everything you’d expect the browser to have. I don’t have any complaints. I just would think with browser, what would make me switch, and one of things that I guess is a big deal with this Opera 10 is the incorporation of Opera Turbo, which is a technology they announced in February which is kind of a… it’s a server-based compression system, where if you’re in a slower connection, it will kick in, take whatever you’re trying to browse as far as a web site, pass it to their server, and compresses it by about 80% supposedly. So I guess that’s the big deal here, but those of us on high-speed connections aren’t that concerned.

Kevin: Well, this is a recurring theme I’m hearing in this show. We’ve got Google sending blurry versions of their maps and we’ve got Opera automatically compressing pages, it seems like although those of us making podcasts and the like may be spoiled for bandwidth, it’s good to see these companies not leaving behind the dial-up users.

Patrick: No, absolutely I agree. I think it sounds really cool. It’s hard to speak in details but they have a website dedicated to Turbo and they have this fancy little graph that shows how you’re surfing in Opera or from an Opera mobile device and put your request in if you’re in a slower connection that goes through their Turbo servers and it passes the website through there and it compresses it. I don’t know how it works. Probably, some sort of, obviously, cache or compression where the server’s doing the heavy lifting and you’re just getting past the smaller versions but yeah, I mean it sounds like a really cool piece of technology.

Kevin: This is something that Opera’s been doing on portable devices for a while with their Opera Mini browser. Anyone who has a standard Java phone will usually find that Opera Mini is a better browser than the one that comes with their phone and it works exactly the same way by passing everything through Opera’s servers and the reason for doing it there besides bandwidth and speed is also the fact that the phone is less capable of doing complex CSS layouts so a lot of the heavy lifting is done on the server and the phone has less work to do to lay out the page.

Patrick: I guess the question I would have would be – I know OK they have been doing it for a while, is it part of the part of the promotion of the browser, like they think, “Oh, we have this feature, this will keep people using Opera. This is how we’ll bring people in.” Is that how it works? Is there some way they’re monetizing this or is it just kind of a feature that they’re paying for.

Kevin: It seems that these days, Opera’s making their money by selling their portable and Embedded versions of their browsers so the Opera Mobile browser that you get on some phones and the Opera browser that you can get on the Nintendo Wii and other things like this, that’s how they’re making their money, through deals like that. I guess their desktop browser, the free one, is just to promote their skills at making awesome browsers.

Patrick: Okay, fair enough.

Kevin: I suppose it’s useful for developers as well if these browsers all share similar rendering environments. You can do your testing in the Opera desktop browser and have some confidence that it will work in their mobile browsers.

The big design change was the tab bar, I hear. Did you have a look at that at all?

Patrick: I did play around with it a little bit, the tab area and adding in different – playing with the tabs. One thing I noticed is that when you start a new tab, it’s got screens, it loads screens for any websites that you have I guess set to bring up with the new tab. So for instance right now, on the default, it’s got the Discover Opera page brought up in sort of a thumbnail, one of nine possible screens and you can kind of preview the page and view it that way but as far as I’ve seen and read, the Opera Turbo thing is really one of the major bells and whistles that they’re kind of trotting out with this.

Kevin: Alright. Speaking of new browsers, we’ve got Apple finally releasing Safari 4. That browser has been in beta since February if I’m not mistaken and when the beta came out, we spoke briefly about the user interface design changes that were made to that browser and the biggest one was that they pulled a Google Chrome and put all of the tabs along the top of the window where the title bar would normally be.

So this upset a few Apple users, right Stephan?

Stephan: Yeah. I think a lot of people just got annoyed with the fact that if you clicked in the wrong space, you’d close the tab and they let their thoughts be known. I never had the issue, and I kind of like tabs at the top—

Patrick: Don’t say that out loud!

Stephan: —and so I stuck with the beta, so far I haven’t switched over on the Mac. I switched over on the Windows computer and I have to tell you, the rendering engine is amazing. I pulled up a page in Chrome and then Safari and my unscientific test, Safari is faster.

Kevin: They’re definitely crowing about their JavaScript performance. At least for the next week, Safari will be on top of the charts with JavaScript performance. The SunSpider benchmark which was created by the WebKit effort, so to be fair that’s the same team of developers that’s building the rendering engine at the heart of Safari but also Google Chrome and other browsers. This benchmark tests only core JavaScript language performance so it doesn’t test things like JavaScript making changes to a web page or using other browser APIs but as far as raw JavaScript performance goes, at their Worldwide Developer Conference keynote earlier this week, Apple was touting speeds of 7.8 times as fast as Internet Explorer 8 for Safari 4 whereas Chrome 2 was 5.4 times as fast, Firefox 3 was 1.7 times as fast. I’m afraid Opera did not get a look-in in that particular graph but I would say that Opera has been doing some great work on JavaScript performance though as well and I’d guess they would be somewhere between Chrome and Firefox on that graph. But here, we have Internet Explorer 8 sitting right at the back of the pack again and in fact, Apple took the opportunity to give a bit of a ribbing to Microsoft. They said, “By the way, the scale of this graph is Internet Explorer 8,” and audience chuckled appropriately.

Stephan: Hehe.

Patrick: Oooooh.

Kevin: Is Microsoft unable to keep up with the performance or is Microsoft choosing to put their priorities elsewhere, that’s the question I have.

Stephan: I don’t think they care. Do you, Patrick? It seems like they’re kind of like, “Eh, oh well, that’s not the most important thing to our everyday users.”

Patrick: Yeah. This is a podcast that’s listened too by developers so obviously this JavaScript stuff means a lot but the average person doesn’t pull up three web pages and say, “Oh, this one loads Java faster.” If it loads quick enough and it’s not hanging then that’s what people are going to care about, not necessarily a benchmark at the World Wide Developers Conference. Overall performance is what people will care about and that goes to the Acid test as well, when I’m trying out a browser I’m not thinking, “Oh, this passes 100 on the Acid test, that’s awesome, I’m using this.” I’m just going with the works best for me and that’s not always tied to the Acid test. So they’re nice numbers, kudos to the teams, but at the same time, there’s more to this game than that I think.

Kevin: But at the same time, these other browsers seem to be betting the farm on the JavaScript performance. Google in particular seems to see this bright future where all applications move into the browser and in order for that to be practical and real, they need better JavaScript performance and that seems to be what is driving Google to focus on JavaScript performance. Apple is doing the same thing for their own reasons. I’m not sure exactly how that fits into Apple’s strategy. They do have a few online services but certainly nothing at the scale of what we’re seeing from Google. The Firefox 3 browser, the release candidate is coming out probably around the same time as you’re listening to this podcast, is expected to have a huge boost in JavaScript performance as well. So we’ll see Firefox jump from 1.7 times IE8 to something approaching the Safari and Chrome numbers. And I guess to be fair, Internet Explorer 8 is said to be about twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 before it in JavaScript speed. So Microsoft is doing work here but I don’t know, maybe they just had a lot of catching up to do still with Internet Explorer 8 and scripting performance is going to be something they’ll look at in the next version.

Stephan: What would be interesting to me is a poll or some kind of test or something where people – we just ask regular people why they use the browser that they use and just compile the results because I can guarantee you, most people aren’t going to say speed. My wife does not use Firefox because it’s fast; my wife uses it because it’s got tabs. That’s exactly what she would say. Then I tell her Internet Explorer has them.

Patrick: Yeah, I know! That’s believable. 

Stephan: So I really think we need to get the answers from the people that aren’t nerds going to these conferences.

Patrick: Hah. Nice.

Kevin: The one browser that I can really understand focusing on JavaScript performance is Firefox because their entire user interface is built in JavaScript as well and so an improvement to JavaScript performance is wholesale improvement to every aspect of the browser there. So there’s really no reason not to look at that.

Stephan: What you were saying about Apple earlier about building JavaScript and why they’re improving it so much — maybe they see that Google is really going this way and want to make sure they get a piece of the action. They want to make sure that their browser works with whatever Google is coming up with.

Kevin: So they’re hedging their bets you’re saying?

Stephan: Yeah. They know Google is going to come up with some stuff, hence Wave, things like that, so they need to have a browser that’s able to work with them to stay competitive in the market I would say as far as browsers go.

Kevin: Alright, so Patrick mentioned the Acid test just quickly there and at the same World Wide Developers Conference, Apple was taking every opportunity to serve Microsoft and they made a point of saying Safari 4 which is also out now, is the first browser to pass the Acid3 test, 100 out of 100 whereas, of course, Internet Explorer 8 is last place with 21 out of 100. I was fascinated to hear the speaker describe the Acid3 test as, “The ultimate test for standardness.”

Stephan: (laughing)

Patrick: Trademark that puppy.

Kevin: I think the developers of the test itself would disagree with that. The Acid test has always been about picking and choosing points – I guess you would call them edge cases in the programming world. These little details that have slipped through the crack in the standards, they’re not things generally that will affect developers day to day in the real world. The Acid test has always been about calling up the browser and getting them over that last 1% of standards compliance line. So by definition, if a browser is worried about passing the Acid test, usually it means they’ve done 99% of the standard compliance work and on those particular standards and if they were interested in pushing the boundaries of standards compliance, they would be better served going out and implementing vast swaths of CSS 3 or HTML 5, rather than trying to get over that Acid3 test line. And yet, the test has that reputation that developers will respect you for doing that extra work. But is it the ultimate test of standardness, whatever standardness is; I’m not even sure that’s a real word.

Patrick: Who standardizes standardness is what I’d like to know.

Kevin: Yes, whoo! The next thing on our list today is Palm. This is again, something that Apple took a cheap shot at in their WWDC keynote but I found it rang a little more hallow. Palm released their Palm Prē phone which is meant to compete directly with iPhone as a slick smartphone touch screen experience. Palm has been said to be betting the company on this device and for developers, it’s really interesting, for web developers especially because the web OS that runs on the Palm Prē means that all applications on the phone are built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are new APIs that come with the software developer kit for this so that you’re not always forever talking about styling DIVs and setting their absolute positioning but the languages that you’re using are familiar to a web developer and they just happen to have other APIs that are more suited to building these mobile apps. So here we have Palm releasing this new device a couple of days before Apple’s big keynote and at the keynote Apple touts the 50,000 applications that have been built for the iPhone and they snidely remarked that the Palm Prē only has something like 18 applications just a couple of days after launch. So I guess…

Stephan: I think it’s kind of unfair, right?

Kevin: Right absolutely. It’s totally unfair. Clearly.

Stephan: It’s kind of obvious.

Kevin: How many third party applications do the iPhone have day one? I guess, it would be zero because they didn’t even have a software development kit. They were telling people build the applications that run our mobile Safari web browser that should be good enough, right? 

So the question I have and we’ve looked at this before is if you’re a web developer and you want to break into the world of mobile applications, maybe you’ve got a web application that’s doing well and you want to allow people to take it with them in their pocket, do you (a) look at the Palm Prē and the web OS because it has development languages that you’re already familiar with or do you (b) look at the iPhone that has a bit of a barrier to entry because you have to learn new languages but purportedly, these languages are more suited to building mobile apps and it will be easier and more fun to build that application once you get over that hurdle.

Stephan: You see, I don’t know. I follow a lot of iPhone developers on Twitter and things, and I read their blog posts and some of these guys are starting to complain that it’s just getting out of hand with what the SDK is turning into. These guys feel like they’re developing for Windows Mobile all over again.

Kevin: Oh really?

Stephan: So I don’t know. I’d be tempted to just … just as one example, but I’d be tempted to go for the Web. To me, it just make sense right?

Kevin: Right.

Stephan: I’d still develop an app for the iPhone in Safari over a standalone application on the device.

Kevin: As a web developer.

Stephan: Yeah. That’s the way I would go.

Kevin: The one thing that that gets you, building for the browser is that you aren’t subject to Apple’s censorship in their apps door and that’s been a big point of contention that a lot of these apps have been rejected for the strangest of reasons. We had recently an e-book reading application that was rejected on the grounds that you could find online and download a copy of the Kama Sutra to read in this e-book reader and based on that, it was rejected. Eventually, the community kicked up a stink and the application was let in but for every application that gets let in after a complaint, there are others that are stonewalled and that aren’t allowed in for sometimes the strangest reasons. You hear things like, you know, this application has a button with an icon on it that looks too much like the official iPhone icon used by Apple and so it’s rejected. And so if you’re building a web app, it gets right in. Apple has no say in the matter.

Stephan: Yeah. I agree.

Patrick: One thing I’d throw out there, if all things equal, if I was developer looking at this iPhone or Palm Prē, ideally, you’d try to do both but if you’re looking Prē and you’re saying there’s 5000 apps from the iPhone and 18 or whatever on the Prē, you have an opportunity with the Prē to potentially get in on the ground floor as far as an app developer where you could actually make a name for yourself as a developer of some big apps or as a major developer on that platform and if it takes off, you would stand to reap the benefit. iPhone certainly has the base, but at the same time you’re competing with 5000 for attention. So that might be something to just think about as well.

Kevin: Right. So it’s not sure whether the Palm Prē will be a success but it’s easier to stand out as one in 18 applications than one in 50,000.

Stephan: Are they seeing the Prē as more of a gaming device like we’ve kind of seen with the iPhone go?

Kevin: I’m not sure that it has the same level of APIs for that kind of thing. If you’re building your applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I can’t imagine 3D graphics are going to be a strong point. It seems more like a productivity device. If there were games, they’d be …

Patrick: Doom for the win. 

Stephan: Tetris.

Kevin: Yeah Tetris, 2D games I could see working because you’d building them with the <canvas> tag, so 2D graphics that you draw with JavaScript. Certainly, you could push the boundaries and do 3D graphics in there but I wouldn’t have fun doing it.

Stephan: I was just wondering because that’s another aspect where some developers wanted to develop games.

Kevin: Our last story today is Microsoft Bing which is the new search engine that Microsoft has released. In fact, it seems to be replacing Live Search. Microsoft Bing is being build as a ‘decision-making engine.’ There are TV ads that are very flashy and show how that you can search for things like flights and travel accommodation and health information and the search engine reforms itself to accommodate the particular type of search you’re doing and help you make those decisions. That’s the marketing spin. For developers, Bing has an API and that’s the latest release, and the exciting thing is the API has no real limit it seems on the number of queries you can make. This is something we’re used to seeing from other search engine APIs and yet with Bing, you get your developer ID and then you can just go ahead and go nuts as long as the queries are being used for a public facing application. You can use as much as you want.

Patrick: I think this is a shrewd move by Microsoft just because I think what they’re going for is adoption and what’s the easiest to get adoption as far as developers incorporating it into whatever than to say, “Hey, you know use it as much as you want, knock yourself out, here you go.”

Kevin: Have any of you guys used Bing from a client’s perspective so have you replaced your Google search in your browser with Bing?

Stephan: Nope.

Patrick: I haven’t, but I have played around with it a little bit and I mean I could see where it has some promise. Certainly, they have work to do. When it come to search engines, you compare Google or Bing and sometimes one is better, sometimes the other is better, I’ve seen that for sure, but I think it has potential in the way they categorize information, sort of trying to be that decision engine that you talked about as kind of the marketing term, I guess. But like if you search for a city and a country or city, state, you’ll find it will be categorized into thing like results itself and then a map for that area, hotels, for the area, weather, history, travel – so you can go on all these sorts of directions right from the search results page and it’s a little more dynamic than say Google. So I think it has potential of maybe dealing with that information overload but obviously the thing is adoption and we’ll have to see how people take to it.

Kevin: Yeah. I’ve been using Bing just as an experiment for the past week and I agree, it’s comparable to Google for me and sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse. I’d say I’m less familiar with it and so I’m a little less productive with it but if Google disappeared tomorrow, I would make do with Bing just fine. 

Looking at the announcement of the API, some of the things that pop out at me are you can as a developer choose to participate in a pilot program to get revenue out of your search. So what you do is you agree for Microsoft to return advertisements along with the search results and you display those in your application right along side the search results and you get paid for that.

Stephan: That’s kind of neat and I think another kind of useful thing here is that since it’s unlimited queries, technically you can have like a WordPress or blogging plug-in where you search live in the application for an image or something and it just plugs right into your post, which for Google, you have to go out and got to go find it, you got to check to make sure it’s usable and blah, blah, blah. So I think they’ve got something neat going on here and I like the ad part of it for people who have search on their site to think it will be something that’s useful.

Kevin: Wouldn’t be interesting if Google became the search engine that people use in their browser but Bing became the search engine that developers used behind the scenes in their apps. I think that would drive Google crazy, they wouldn’t sit idly by and let that happen but wouldn’t it be interesting?

Stephan: What does Google’s API currently allow?

Kevin: It’s a similar thing; they do have limits but my experience as a developer is anytime you run up against this limit, it is really just there to force you to get in touch with the service provider. We were using Twitter pretty heavily during our 5-for-1 bushfire support sale and we ran into limits of the Twitter API and we just got in touch with Twitter and they said, “Sure, we just wanted to make sure that you got in touch with us and that we knew that what you were doing was on the up and up,” and they threw a little switch and released the limit. So I would say that none of these are hard limits and even limits that apply to the Google Search API. If you get in touch with Google and make your case, they’re likely to accommodate you, assuming what you’re doing is not building a competing search engine. 

So that brings our show to close. Let’s go around the table, the slightly smaller table than usual this week.

Patrick: Sure, our co-host, Brad Williams was absent tonight but you can find him at webdevstudios.com and on Twitter as @williamsba. I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network, also on Twitter as @ifroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and my blog is at badice.com.

Kevin: And the SitePoint podcast is at sitepoint.com/podcast. Visit us there to leave comments on this episode and subscribe to receive all our shows automatically. Email us at podcast@sitepoint.com with your questions, comments, and things you’d like us to discuss. The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker and I’m Kevin Yank. You can follow me on Twitter @sentience. 

Thanks for listening. Bye bye.