Software As She’s Developed

I have the honour of delivering a keynote at the Tools Europe conference in Zurich next week, as well as at the “Mining Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop, which, as you can tell from its title, I’m looking forward to participating in. The workshop chairs are Dragos Manolescu and Joe Yoder. The keynote is on OpenSocial, Gadgets, […]

[Read more →]

I just realised there’s no good executive summary for OpenSocial. Every resource fluffs about the “social” aspect and forgets about the UI aspect. The UI aspect, essentially a gadget specification, is just as important as the social aspect, notwithstanding its absence from the “OpenSocial” brand name. I’m not a fan of the name “OpenSocial” […]

[Read more →]

Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, Google, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets Background A while back, I walked through a Google Gadget I made called Digg Roundup, which simply shows Digg headlines and can be customised on topic and popularity. In my quest for an uber-simple tutorial, one thing I skipped on was content type, the subject of the present muttering. […]

[Read more →]

I just made my first Google Gadget - a Digg roundup tool. Here are some quick notes on making a Google Gadget for Ajax developers. I assume you know Ajax and also that you've played around with iGoogle as a user. What's a Gadget? The gadget is an XML file sitting on your server. In [...]

[Read more →]

The Search Engine Experiment - a blind test where users rate relevance of results - reveals that Google is better, but not that much better. The methodology is reasonable - the only serious flaw might be if people are assuming Google is always relevant, then trying to pick the Google results. Or if people go [...]

[Read more →]

Google Base: It goes beyond classifieds. The popular view today seems to be that Google Base is all about classifieds, but as mentioned earlier, it's much more than that. (Incidentally, still smarting I missed the "All Your Bases" happy fun humorous moment opportunity.) If Google Base lets you tag entries, you could easily create a podcast [...]

[Read more →]

Google's apparently releasing base.google.com. While some see it as a Craigslist play, it's a lot more than that: Google has seen the future, and the future is one big mashup of microcontent. "A" microcontent is a small chunk of information, typically with its own URL, but not actually a web page. It's not a web [...]

[Read more →]

Don Norman questions the conventional wisdom on Google: Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out [...]

[Read more →]