Gallery 2.0 came out. Like I wrote about before, this is a really great upgrade. It’s matured in many ways: SQL for the database backend, significant UI improvements (especially for the installer), and a ton of modules (plugins) for extra functionality. Try out my demo or go check it out yourself. Gallery 1 upgrades are supported too!
Kudos to the Gallery 2 team on a great product.
The year is 2005. The web has become commonplace, and people are ready for more dynamic content in their browsing experience. The ensuing battle of AJAX and Flash is fought tooth and nail. Macromedia Macrodobe claims 98% penetration of the Flash client on web-enabled computers, and even if that sounds decidedly optimistic AJAX likely has a level near that. The competition only becomes greater and greater for Web 2.0 apps, and everyone has the potential to benefit.
So. Check out this cool Flash revamped version of popular Earth mapping software du jour (currently Google Maps and MSN Earth). Decide for yourself who’s going to win the upcoming battle. I’d normally say Flash, but it’s had more than a few years headstart and hasn’t receieved nearly the attention from “serious” coders that AJAX has displayed of late. Possibly it’s only hype, or maybe it’s because there exists no Linux version of the Flash builder…or, possibly, ActionScript sucks a little too much. I still wistfully remember wasting 3 hours in a row debugging array code because the ActionScript interpreter wouldn’t display an error message. It stumped 3 labbies.
I’ve realized that some web designers prefer writing their own CMS systems wrapped in custom CSS, and also that this site design is getting a little stale. So I’m going to switch to a newWordPress theme with a few new features.
Props to WP for abstracting functionality enough so theme development becomes easier.
Information is everyone’s most valuable asset, from corporate conglomerates to college students. If one assumes people tend to search for what they’re interested in, then its probably not a stretch to say that Google has more information about the personal activities and interests of its millions of customers than most companies have had in the history of, well, history. This is why John makes a good point.
Google can’t (yet) reasonably attribute it’s collected user information to a specific person, but rather to an IP address (only geographic information). Surely Gmail with its generous 1GB 2GB+ of storage has proven useful for many people, just like Google search has been for the past few years. But even if I didn’t already have free web email, I wouldn’t use it.
Being in the business of information management and organization gives you a lot of power, exhibited by the huge revenue Google receives through targeted advertising systems. To successfully target customers, it must acquire as much information uniquely attributed to each of its customers as possible. This means Gmail, just like the rest of Google, must acquire information about its users by parsing through emails for information.
Here’s the rub. The content of every search query I perform is entirely controlled by me, but the situation is turned around with email. I clearly wouldn’t ever search for things like my SSN or passwords on a public search engine. However, if I forgot a password to a website, the first option I tend to use is “Send password to user email account.”
Even though Google uses a cookie to uniquely ID it’s search users to create a user history, and even though mine is set to expire (at a rather generous) “Sunday, January 17, 2038 6:33:16 AM”, I trade that privacy for Google’s convenience factor. That, and it’s a trivial matter to nuke cookies. Crawling the contents of user’s email, even if it is automated, crosses my privacy line.
Paranoid? Maybe. But even if I have to run my own mail server, I won’t be letting 3rd parties sift through my emails.
Aimfight.com was posted at Slashdot today. The site is a simple incarnation of social networking visualization, and represents another emergence of this untapped field. Compared to the extensive amounts of web research, social networking isn’t nearly as explored, likely because the two markets are thoroughly different.
In the world of Internet-life, email represents real mail, where friends’ messages and junk mail both arrive in your inbox and you can met new friends easily at sites like Chatempanada.com as well. The web is harder to model, but suffice it to say that Amazon and eBay are like physical stores, just with exceedingly large stockrooms. Chatting, therefore, is most similar to a telephone conversation. It’s between two people, and you can’t just call anyone without knowing their screenname/phone number first.
This inherent privacy is largely the reason social networking is still so unexplored. It’s a tough sell to ask people for their buddy list for “research,” just like its hard to get a copy of someone’s address book – for “research” or not. Imagine a future where Amazon customer representatives send you IMs like telemarketers. Spam has no place in the chat room’s hallowed walls!
Aimfight.com gives each screenname a score based upon how many other people have the screenname on their buddylist. I was wondering how the developers managed to acquire up to date copies of every AIM users’s buddy list, assuming that this site is unaffiliated with AOL. It has that independent web project feel. Although the site neglects to mention it, the site was created by two software engineers at AOL.