The "one-half" kind of platform on the Internet

My friend Bill asked my opinion today on the excellent article from Marc Andreessen -- The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet.

I replied via email, but then thought this dried up blog of mine may get a few words as well. So, here is the quote.

What can I say? It's a very nice classification attempt-slash-summary, a good place to refer somebody to, etc. I enjoyed reading it.

But I think he may be wrong in presuming a strong separation between clients and servers. In his view the only true platform is that in which a "server" somewhere either runs the user code (level 3) or it does not (levels 1/2). If we include the browser into the mix as a full member the picture becomes a much more interesting and complex one. Security aside it's possible to imagine an application that pulls its parts from various sources (either through some browser extension for "trusted" JS sources or through a platform-registered proxy of some kind or through a greasemonkey-like mechanism) and then executes on the client/browser. It instantly achieves full "Level 3" platform status -- there is virtually no cost for developer and the code runs in the same space as the "core" platform code. At the same time it's much easier to provide on the "platform" developer side -- less security/throttling/fairness overhead.

That's what I think.

Andrew.

Ad-supported google phone?

With the recent hype around "google phone" I am wondering... If it turns out to be true is google simply going to make it a device with a slick interface and a couple of google-ish features, or, would they try to change the laws of the market?

I mean, they are kings of ads, they tried a limited area with a free ad-supported wi-fi. So, would not it be interesting if they planned an ad-supported cell phone? It senses where you are, it shows you local businesses, the businesses pay google, you get either a free service or a discount towards the service..

There are of course privacy and fraud issues, but... it's interesting nonetheless.

Illusion -- you can't touch that piggy

I was going through unread entries in Mighty Optical Illusions tonight...

This holographic piggy struck a mighty cord -- I saw it with my dad several years ago in some tourist trap store.. Universal Studios most likely. The store demonstration used the same pink piggy as in the article photo -- so between ourselves we always refer to it as "the piggy that is not there illusion".

We were both so impressed that when I got home I wrote a little script to calculate the kind of mirror it would take to produce the effect. Believe it or not, my dad was going to build the actual mirrors to try it out based on the printout of that script.

So.. Turns out the script is still there and still works. I dusted it off a bit and converted to the platform my site is on now. Take a look if you're curious -- full source code is there as well.

This image is built on the fly:



The image URL is: http://ejelta.com/am/piggy.png

Several parameters are accepted: size=##, noaxis=1, norays=1, hzcheck=1.

Enjoy!

ISBNdb.com/Google Co-Op Integration

Following up on the recent Google Co-Op announcement ISBNdb.com now supports a set of custom queries in Google for those who opt-in.

The one I like the most is the simplest of queries we support -- in my Firefox I can simply do Ctrl+J, type "isbndb some title" and hit "Enter". That's all it takes to get a page with Google search results and a box linking directly to the same search for "some title" on ISBNdb.com -- sort of a search shortcut.

Links:

• ISBNdb.com Google Co-Op page


• Co-Op public profile

What do you think? Some other interesting ideas for Google Co-Op?

Mechanical Turk - the ultimate Turing test

Somehow I ended up today looking at long expected (only I expected Google to offer it first, what with GFS and such) Amazon S3 data storage web service and JungleDisk as a way to use it for files backup/transfer under Linux. Looks cool so far.

...but that's not the topic of this post. The topic is Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- in essense a system that allows to integrate humans and their brains into arbitrary software. It does not yet feed those humans, no Matrix for you, but it does pay them money.

What occured to me is that this could prove to be the ultimate platform for the Turing test.

We have some software that wants a human to do some task and pays that human for that. What would an entrepreneur do? I think the best way to make money on it is to design another program that would pretend to be human by performing that task. Right? We have the platform, we have demand, we have the economic stimulus -- an ideal situation for an interesting invention.

I can't wait to hear first rumors..

Unicode fix-ups on ISBNdb.com

Just a qiuck note that I ran ISBNdb.com's database through a series of filters fixing problems with older non-Unicode data (iso-8859-1 and marc-8 stored as broken or partially encoded utf-8). This affected roughly 1% of the data. The result is that practically all data we have now is in proper Unicode.

More interesting updates soon...

Speaking of usability -- GMail

I was a happy user of elm, and then mutt since.. oh, I don't know -- about 1992 I believe. Yes, text only mail reader.

I started using GMail a couple of months ago just out of curiousity at first. In a month I moved most of my various mail accounts there leaving only one out of the loop -- just in case.

Why do I tell that? To show how much I am impressed and how I think GMail is a really high quality product.

And now, all that said, here is what bothers me most about GMail:

1. Make these buttons stay put
   Look at these two screenshots of what is essentially the same thing -- message view:
   
   
   
   
   Notice that the buttons at the top are different -- to the point that in the same image width the dropdown does not fit in one image. You have to actually read the labels and if the intent is to "archive" you have to hunt for that option in the "More..." dropdown menu.
   
   Now, I do realise that deep inside the "Archive" and "Remove 'todo' label" are actually the same button -- "Archive" is essentially "Remove 'Inbox' label". But this is a technicality I as a user don't want to be concerned about. I don't want to re-read ever shifting buttons every time I want to do something -- I just want to click and be done with it.
   
   This is so basic that it goes back to 1997 Jakob Nielsen's top ten mistakes list, and has been re-iterated many times since.
   
   
2. Message editing - [TAB] misbehavior
   
   At least in Firefox if while you're typing in the message you hit "Tab" and then "Space" -- you end up sending the message, no questions asked. Whereas all you probably wanted to do was to add some white space in the message. Ask me how I know.. or ask people who got half-baked messages from me.
   
   Either suppress tab altogether or make it behave like it is intuitively expected when typing up text in an editor.
   
   
3. Hilight messages from people in my contact list
   
   Title says it all -- such option would be very convenient. Can be implemented as a checkbox in filters "message is from somebody in my [dropdown] contact list" and add one more action -- "highlight it".
   
   
4. Filters -- add priorities and "this filter is final" checkbox
   
   Due to filters being all on the same priority level and all executing for every message there is no way to do certain things. For instance, if I want to move CVS commits to their own label, skip the inbox and not apply any other tags I can't do that -- because they are addressed to my "technical" email and they get labeled as such as well. As the title says -- add priorities and a checkbox to say "this filter is final, skip the rest". Yes, it may be confusing for mom-and-pop somewhere out there, but can't I wish?
   
   
5. Custom from problem
   
   What Danny Sullivan says in his #18. Very annoying to have to answer to people about what is my actual email address. If you give an option to have a custom from -- make it work. If the reason is branding and advertising of gmail -- let me pay for it, I won't mind paying.
   
   
6. Multiple froms, why not provide MX'es?
   
   And speaking of custom froms -- why not provide MX'es for domains? Free or pay-for, I don't care -- but it would have been nice. So that someone buying a johndoeontheweb.org domain could point its MX record at gmail and happily get all of that domain's mail in his inbox without a need for redirects.
   
   
7. Working with individual messages
   
   This is minor. But sometimes it can be useful to work with individual messages, not whole conversations -- if a lengthy conversation resulted in some decision, or a nice technical trick I'd want to tag that one final message with a "todo" or "howto" label.
   
   
8. Bulk upload of old mail
   
   I know it's possible, but some nice interface where you can actually upload an old mailbox and let gmail parse it out, archive and make it searchable would have been nice.
   

Did you make it this far? Thanx, I owe you :)

And if you work for google -- count me in, I won't mind testing new features and interface layouts.

Google Calendars missing feature

I am not much of a calendar user. Yes, I always liked the idea of scheduling and yes, I did make a couple of attempts at using various calendar apps over the years, but... the most I do typically is circle a day on the fridge paper calendar at home or email myself reminders in the office.

Hopefully that's because I use wrong types of calendars. May be what I need is the new Google Calendars feature.

It looks and feels great, I like it. But I think there is an immediate problem with it -- there seems to be no way to say "this event repeats every {{period}}". Which is especially strange with their default suggestion of "Mom's birthday" for the entry field.

Am I stupid and simply can't find it, or is it truly not there?

And if it does not show up in a condensed way somewhere on the gmail screen -- I'll probably end up forgetting all about this new calendar app as well...

Python library for ISBNdb.com's API

Since we lack a section for 3-rd party tools on ISBNdb.com I'll post it here for now -- Daniel Bickett has created a Python module for accessing ISBNdb.com's API.

I'm no expert in Python, but it looks like an easy to use and nicely implemented project.

Thanx, Daniel!

Tracking referrers in a hosted blog

I got curious about where people come from to this blog (not that I have swarms of visitors -- I should have probably said "curious IF people come to this blog").

Since this is hosted by Blogger.com and I don't have access to the server logs I used this simple webbug -- added this javascript one-liner into the template:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"><!--//
if(document.referrer) {
  document.write('<img src="http://ejelta.com/images/myblog.gif?ref=' +
                 escape(document.referrer)+
                 '" width="1" height="1" alt=""/>');
}
//--></script>

It sends a request to the server where I do have control over server logs, so I can grep for myblog.gif and see the referrers.

Thought I'd post this in case it may be useful for somebody else.