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If you haven’t been following the tale of the new open alternative to Facebook, you really must check in. In the wake of widespread dissatisfaction with Facebook’s handling of privacy issues, four New York University students, who were already working on an open social networking solution, have raised over $115,000 in funding for their offering: Diaspora. While many observers are focusing on Diaspora itself, it’s an unproven platform, and the real success that it has had is in illustrating how tired people are of Facebook’s closed, privacy-invading policies.

In Wired.com’s shout-out for an open alternative to Facebook last Friday, the world’s most popular social network was described as out of control:

"Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."

The column from Wired.com does a pretty good job of dissecting each of the steps that Facebook has taken down the lane of privacy invasion. GigaOM’s analysis, "Facebook Needs To Find Its Voice On Privacy," is also worth reading. "The relationship between privacy and Facebook is always going to be complicated," it notes, and that’s true.

As Matt Asay notes, Diaspora is an upstart project that represents no threat to Facebook at this point. Among other things, he notes that Diaspora introduces unnecessary levels of complexiy to social networking. It’s also worth noting that Identi.ca has been pursuing open source social networking for a long time, but has a tiny fraction of Facebook’s audience.

Still, as we’ve noted before, both Facebook and Twitter suffer from the fundamental problem that they are closed systems. They harken back to the early days of email, when you had to be on, say, MCI Mail, or CompuServe, to send another computer user a message. Facebook and Twitter are walled gardens that don’t allow users enough control over their interaction with others. Diaspora is unlikely to ever threaten Facebook’s dominance, but the welcome it has received in such a short time shows how fed up people are with Facebook’s policies. In the long run, Facebook will likely face more serious challenges from open alternatives to its service.

computerdeskoffice.jpg Late last week Socialtext’s Michael Idinopulos wrote a post with some interesting advice for anyone looking to start a social software implementation in the enterprise: skip the pilot. His argument was that since the new breed of enterprise 2.0 tools are about human interaction, something which changes dramatically at scale, then small pilots were not a useful barometer of future success or failure.

Idinopulos admitted that pilots are great for traditional IT, which revolves around a set of actions that do not change much whether it’s 10 or 10,000 people (think billing or adding leads in a CRM). We agree that in any kind of collaboration, the shift from 10 to 10,0000 causes dramatic change. But that leaves an open question: do you still use pilots for your wikis, blogs, and other social software implementations, or are they a waste of time?

In one sense it’s a little strange for Idinopulos to question the need for pilots, since Socialtext’s switch to freemium was pitched to us with pilots as one important use case. It makes us wonder whether the “free 50″ version has seen less use as a pilot than the company expected.

But whether you’re looking at a big social platform like Socialtext, or something much simpler, whether or not you spend time and energy on a pilot is an important issue. We generally feel that the premise Idinopulos presents is correct; interaction among workers in a tiny subset of your organization isn’t a fair test.

But where does that leave us? Are pilots a necessary evil to support purchasing decisions, or a waste of time that gives an inaccurate picture of how enterprise 2.0 really plays out? We’d like to hear whether you love or loathe pilots in the enterprise.

The MSC VisuRDK reference design kit offers a H8SX-based single-chip solution with a resolution up to WVGA (800×480), 32 bit computing power, larger on-chip memories of 1MB FLASH, and additional interfaces like USB and Ethernet. The MSC VisuRDK kits is an ideal solution for the direct control of TFT displays using a general purpose microcontroller. The kit also contains a complete microcontroller developer environment including IDE, complier (test license) as well as an E10A-JTAG emulator.
MSC VisuRDK reference design kit

With the intelligent hard and software combination, a TFT display can be controlled directly and without an additional graphics controller. The system costs can be significantly reduced by omitting the graphics controllers used so far in such applications. This microcontroller-based approach of the VisuRDK kits offer an interesting alternative for applications where the embedded PC solution or the use of an expensive graphics subsystem would be much too powerful and expensive.

The kit is a fast and easy introduction to graphic programming for developers. Graphic interfaces can be quickly created and tested with the help of graphics libraries and program examples. Within the shortest time, develoeprs can adapt the examples to their requirements. The software drivers are provided in the source code and the touch panel support is also integrated. Besides the provided QVGA TFT with touch, the kit also offers support for TFT displays from different manufacturers.

If you tell most folks that Diaspora is promising to build a distributed, open-source social network, they are apt look at you glassy-eyed. Perhaps they’ll nod and say, “Oh. Cool.” Tell those same people that Diaspora is promising to build an alternative to Facebook, and they’re much more likely to know what you are talking about. And as of late, it’s much more likely they’ll nod and say, “Oh! Cool!” - and mean it.

Now, it’s not that the idea of a distributed, open-source social network is a bad one. To the contrary. But the stars that lined up for Diaspora this week and that resulted in their securing over $100,000 in microfunding probably wasn’t due entirely to the technical specifications they boasted for their project: “Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances), Complete PGP encryption, External Service, Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data), Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation, Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code.”

Of course, these details matter. Building an anti-Facebook might be a timely idea, but you also need to have (or hire) the technical chops to bring that idea to fruition.

No matter how beautiful or brilliant your code, investors and customers are probably not all that interested in, for example, the intricacies of how you plan to use JSON to handle your payload. They need to know that your product works and works well, and just as importantly, you need to show them why they’d want to use it.

There are exceptions, for sure, and times when it’s necessary to speak to the technical details. You might need to address why you’ve chosen to build your new smartphone app in Flash, for example.

My point isn’t that your ideas are too geeky or complex. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love geeky, complex ideas. The point is that when you sharing your ideas with others that you need to pay attention to who comprises your audience. You need to make sure that you help them understand why they should care in your ideas (why they should invest in your startup or become your customer) and you need to craft your message accordingly.

You want to give someone a reason why they should use your product. But you needn’t give them the user’s manual.

Today, in a piece called "Google-Microsoft rivalry comes down to clouds or software," ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn considers the specific advantages that Google and Microsoft have relative to each other. He notes that Microsoft’s release of the Office 2010 productivity suite, and its free online version, is causing many people to compare Google Docs to Office, and to consider whether Microsoft is really competitive in the cloud. On this topic, it’s worth remembering that Microsoft has been in the productivity app business a lot longer than Google has.

In considering how Google and Microsoft compete with productivity applications and in the cloud, Blankenhorn says:

"The question is which is more powerful, the computing environment or the cloud itself? That’s the state of play. It’s not ‘who has the best cloud.’ Google does. It’s not ‘who has the best applications.’ Microsoft does."

I couldn’t agree more with that. Nevertheless, it’s amazing how quick people are–in a world of love for all things Google–to treat Google’s cloud-based applications as close competitors to Microsoft’s Office apps. The fact is, the Google apps don’t run anywhere near as deep as, say, Microsoft Excel or Word. Also, for reasons ranging from tie-ins to architectural and development tools such as .Net and Visual Basic, to existing macro libraries, Microsoft’s productivity applications reach out in directions that Google has never gone in. That alone will keep Microsoft’s applications entrenched in businesses.

But Blankenhorn makes the good point that Google does lead in the cloud. That’s just irrefutable. The problem is, when it comes to the applications that business users reach for all day long, a cloud advantage is not enough. People actually care about the depth and quality of the applications they use.

When Google delivers the open source Chrome OS in a few months, it will challenge users to work with all of their data in the cloud. Not some–all. That illustrates how heavily Google banks on its cloud advantage, and how little regard Google has for the basic, built-in depth of productivity applications.

One suggestion that Blankenhorn serves up is for Google to take over stewardship of the OpenOffice suite and tie it in with Google Docs. Because the open source OpenOffice applications have deeper running feature sets than Google’s online apps, that would make sense. It still wouldn’t close the feature-vs.-feature gap between Microsoft’s and Google’s apps, though. Without a doubt, Microsoft has missed several steps in the cloud, but the company has been doing productivity applications for a long time, and it still has a lead in that arena.

From ReadWriteWeb

caracol.jpg An archaeologist told me once that his field was slow to accept new technology. But all it takes are a few and soon the dam has burst. The dam’s yet to burst but there are definitely trickles.

The newest discovery, after a new hominid via Google Earth and the moment an empire formed courtesy rugged handhelds and GPS, is the complete mapping of a large Mayan city from ruins using aerial lasers. In four days.

Instead of taking years to map the complex Mayan city of Caracol in Belize, Professors Arlen and Diane Chase took only four days last year to map the area using lidar, light detection and ranging. In those four days of over-flights, the archaeologists told the New York Times, they put together more information than had been gathered in the previous 25 years. When they were done they had mapped 80 square miles of city and environs.

pharaosh.gifPossibly the most complex (and, technically-speaking, coolest) use of mapping technology in an archaeological context is Professor Kent Weeks’s Theban Mapping Project. It is also a handy microcosm of technology use in the field. Starting in 1978 with tape measures and theodolites, then graduating to “total station” surveying equipment and finally using 360-degree automated laser mapping, Weeks and his crew have surveyed 62 tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. These tombs range in size from a couple of corridors and chambers to, in the case of their biggest discovery, the tomb called KV5, 121. So far.

The extensive computer models of the Valley and of the Theban Necropolis are available as an online atlas for anyone to use.

The most important thing is to learn who we are. If by denying too-soon adoptions of technology and faddish methods we do that, great. But if by experimenting with new technologies in a responsible fashion we advance our knowledge of ourselves, that is equally desirable.

From ReadWriteWeb

“I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Proccesing Layer in the Cloud”

There’s a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It’s all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it’s the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

Sponsor

“It adds a lot of power,” said Mike Cannon-Brooks, co-founder of Atlassian, an Australian collaboration and development software company widely recognized as one of the biggest stars in the Enterprise 2.0 world.

“YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.”

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, “The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement.”

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

“Nothing… It’s pretty awesome,” said Cannon-Brooks.

Yahoo! Query Language

According to Yahoo! Chief Technologist Sam Pullara, the idea behind YQL (launched in October 2008) was to create an agnostic query language similar to SQL, a language familiar to most developers, and let developers use that language to use the Internet as a huge database. “If you make it universally and simply accessible so every application developer doesn’t have to learn every API, it’s be easier for developers to create apps from the data users have taken so much time to make available on the Internet.”

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.
Open Data Tables

Then, this February, Yahoo! launched open data tables. “Initially,” said Pullara, “we had a lot of default tables in the system, mostly Yahoo! API, things like Flickr, local search, Yahoo! weather. For accessing the rest of the Internet, we created dynamic tables that understood things like XML, Atom, RSS, comma-separated value tables such as spreadsheets, etc. Dynamic tables let you access them but not abstract them. Open data tables let you map a 3rd party site, making the data accessible with YQL.”

YQL was used to support a broad range of APIs, almost anything publicly available online, from FriendFeed and Google Reader to the Guardian newspaper. “No one has yet pointed out an API they can’t figure out how to map,” said Pullara.

However, some data could not be accessed without authentication, such as Google Calendar or Netflix. Those APIs were very often very sophisticated and even complicated for the end developer. For these APIs, Yahoo! rolled out YQL Execute on April 29.
YQL Execute

“With Execute,” said Pullara, “the code only needs to be written once, and not necessarily by the app developer. The authentication is all covered by the Yahoo cloud.”

YQL Execute also allows developers to access multiple services and get a single result back. For example, an app developer could call up New York Times articles with specific tags AND Flickr photos with related tags; YQL Execute would return a combined result with both articles and related photographs. Another benefit for developers is the use of the massive Yahoo! infrastructure, as all the heavy lifting of data is done on Yahoo! servers.

And because of the speed, simplicity, and scope of these tools, implications now range much farther than simple mashups. With access to authenticated and private data, more sophisticated applications can be written quickly and easily.
The Dark Side

“The fact is this: If you do not patent, if you do not copyright, if you do not privatize, and if you do not own, you will be ripped off by someone; and you asked for it.”

The above quotation is from Scott D. Reinhart, who has been eyeball-deep in application development longer than many “social media gurus” have been out of high school.

Right alongside the generally held social media dictum that a rich data stream is inherently bankable, there is the hotly debated issue of data ownership. Especially when data is made more valuable by having been parsed, organized, and compared, and most especially when someone creates a revenue stream from previously unmonetizable data, questions of ownership and copyright flare up around the social web.

“Public APIs allow you to easily develop using mature platforms,” said Reinhart, “but they [large IT and social media companies] usually have a hidden intention. In this case they advocate putting your database layer onto their systems… So let’s say I use the Yahoo! data layer, I use BizSpark to get my development tools, and I am making MySpace (Open Social) and Facebook apps using jQuery - who owns my code? Technically, they own everything. They can claim I just made a mashup.

“I would, as someone approaching these systems, stop drinking the Kool-Aid and read the terms of use. Check what it says about ownership.”
Yahoo! Servers for YQL Developers

However, Pullara said of Yahoo!’s claim to developers’ IP, “We don’t own anything.

“If you create an open data table, there’s no requirement to upload it to Yahoo! We do cache data that we pull from APIs and the web to make it faster, but we don’t store that data. It passes through without being collected for permanent storage.”

By contrast, with other services such as Google or Amazon Web Services, developers are required to upload their data, which is stored and executed on the company’s systems. In using Yahoo! YQL, a developer’s data has “a very transient experience and expires from the cache,” said Pullara. “It’s a convenience, not a requirement in any way.”
The Price of Free

Yahoo! has begun investigating potential commercialization of YQL technologies.

“We want to enable rather than discourage more useage ,” said Pullara. “And while people don’t want to pay, they do want to know they’re a customer and have a relationship with Yahoo!”

Currently, Yahoo! has set certain limits on use of their infrastructure. App developers are limited to 100,000 calls per day, per IP address. If the application runs in a browser (hence, on many different IPs), it’s a non-issue. Pullara said, “The limit targets those who would abuse the platform… people who might spin up DoS attacks. You have to have controls in place to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Many developers are enthusiastic about the legitimate and value-adding implementations of the technologies. “The YQL improvements are just sex on legs,” said Cannon-Brooks via Twitter. “The most exciting, least talked about ‘tech of now’ is YQL.”

Blue Pearl Software announced a new EDA business model today. Under their new model, the company is offering short term use of the their tools without having to incur the high cost of purchasing, integrating, and learning the new tools. The products included in the offer are Indigo RTL Analysis, Cobalt Timing Constraint Generation, and Azure Timing Constraint Validation. Blue Pearl Software is offering the basic service at a fixed price along with pricing for continuing services. A single run may be purchased for as little as $2,500. No long term commitment is required, and money spent toward this program may be credited toward an actual tool purchase.

YouTube is a great service but its cluttered user interface leaves a lot to be desired. Minitube is a solid open source YouTube viewing client that gives users a way to search and watch videos without all the visual distractions.

Once installed, just fire up the app and type in a keyword. Minitube pulls up a list of all relevant URLs along with thumbnail images and plays them one after the other. Handy controls at the top of the screen let you quickly pause, play or skip videos. There’s even a button to toggle HD on and off.

My only quibble with Minitube in the inability to delete recent keyword searches. Other than that, it’s a terrific app that eliminates the need to poke around YouTube’s Web site and navigate through a sea of ads, comments, and related videos you may not care about.

Minitube is for Linux and Mac OS X only, and does not require Flash to work. "A few people tried to build Minitube on Windows but the results were not releaseable. This is mainly due to the weakness/instability of Phonon on Windows. Let’s wait for Qt 4.6," writes its developer.

Once upon a time, you could buy a laptop or netbook with an Intel chipset and be confident that it would work well with Linux. That changed drastically with the release of the GMA500 video chipset, named "Poulsbo." Intel let its users down by rebranding a chip made by PowerVR, which is not supported with the mainline Linux kernel and X.org. The company made it worse by passing the buck, and failing to give a clear roadmap for fixing the problem. That was in the fall of last year, but some users had hope that Intel would get it right with the release of MeeGo 1.0. Not so much.

In his post "Poulsbo still makes me sad," Matthew Garrett writes that that MeeGo 1.0 lacks "any form of support" for the GMA500 graphics chipset." Garrett’s reading of the tea leaves suggests that there might be an attempt to get Poulsbo support into the mainline kernel, but says it doesn’t have any chance of getting into the mainline kernel:

So it’s not clear what Intel’s doing here. If this is the driver that Intel are developing for upstream then there’s been a pretty serious breakdown in communication over what their driver has to look like. If it’s not, Intel have another and presumably better driver somewhere that they’re developing entirely behind closed doors despite having shipped millions of units of hardware that people would dearly love to be able to run mainline kernels on.

This may seem like old news, but the users who have machines with Poulsbo chipsets are still waiting for Intel to make good. It’s very disappointing to spend a few hundred bucks on a machine that should have Linux support and find out you’re stuck with a lemon. I picked up one of the afflicted Acer machines via Woot a few months ago, and have been hoping Intel would finally do the right thing and support its Linux users. Intel is making a lot of people sad with this mess.