That is why proposed “battle” between Firefox and Chrome that TechCrunch is pushing does not really exist. They are both excellent browsers and both support the Open Web-standards. So does it really matter to anyone beside Google and the Mozilla Foundation which browser has a larger market share? I don’t think so.

For me this is the future of computing, a completely open set of standards and technologies that make the type of computer, phone, web browsers, tablet you are using irrelevant. They all talk to each other and work.

My biggest complaint about Buzz was that I could not read posts from people I followed without scrolling through several pages of comments first. After the comment collapse changes it is now much better. I can easily skim the people I follow, and if something is interesting expand the comments and join in the discussion.

Keep up the good work Google, Buzz still does not differentiate itself enough from Twitter and Facebook. But if changes keep coming I think it will find it’s place in time.

Say I am using twitter and some @replies me about a Tweet from four hours ago, I might reply to them “Good Point.” Now no one else following me stream has any idea about the context of that reply. They could probably piece it together, but it not worth the effort.

Facebook is meant to be much more closed off, although they are trying hard to get our personal information out there weather we like it or not. Facebook is much better at maintaining the contexts of comments by maintaining a comment thread. But the comments are not valued nearly as much as the original post. It can be hard to see if new comments have been added etc because posts are not bumped up when a new comment is made.

Google Buzz is like a hybrid of both Twitter and Facebook, it allows for completely public posting and followers, but at the same time you can do private posts to a group of people you designate at Friends, Coworkers, etc.

For me however the biggest difference is the way Google Buzz handles replies to Buzz’s. When a person replies or comments to a Buzz that buzz is bumped up in all the followers feeds. This effectively makes peoples comments as powerful as the original posters, and behaves much more like a traditional forum.

The way Buzz works right now is still a little un-wielding and I find it hard to follow public figures using Buzz just because the many people commenting keep all the “popular” buzz right at the top and drowns out everything else. This can be fixed with UI changes etc.

Buzz as a framework though is has some very powerful applications in integrating other services together, and I think might be a stepping stone to get people ready for the idea of using products like Wave.

Overall I am still using Twitter to keep track of things, and Facebook to stay in contact with Friends. But I hope that Google can make Buzz good enough that I can replace both of them.

With the current polling syndication system this is impossible to do without polling every website you are interested in multiple times a second. Pubsubhubsub is building on the current syndication spec and adding push notifications to it, thus allowing real time updates from any enabled site with a syndicated feed. In this post I am going to go over a little more of what I have learnt about PSHS and what it does and how to enable it with WordPress.

So What Does it Do?

The traditional syndication model is pretty simple and based on the standard Web model. The subscriber, a program like Google Reader, FriendFeed, or Flock, polls a feed from the publisher on a schedule. Every hour or thirty minutes the publisher is polled to see if there is anything new.

The Traditional Syndication Model

This method has a couple of problems:

1. Resources: This consumes a lot or resources. Most subscribers have many (hundreds) feeds they are polling all the time, and a site can have thousands of subscribers. So there is a constant polling on a site from thousands of clients.
2. Latency: There is a big problem with lag time between when a post is made, and when the subscriber receives it. Depending on the polling schedule it could be several minutes or hours before a post is picked up.

Going back to Wave again, this model just would not work. The latency alone is not acceptable for real time updates. One of the Wave demos was to update comments on a blog post in the Wave client. The post to the site was instant, then replys came back to the client instantly from the blog. It was possible to carry on a conversation about the blog post via the comments. This adds comment managing problems, but we will have to sort that out later.

So if the Wave client had to wait for minutes for the syndication to pickup each new comment it would lessen the whole experience.

So Pubsubhubsub tries to inject Push into the current syndication model by adding a third party “hub” into the mix. The hub basically acts like a network hub, it takes information from once source and sends it out to multiple clients. What happens now is that the first time the subscriber reads your feed it is told the address of the hub that is associated with the feed. The subscriber will then register with the hub to get notifications about the publishers feed. Now when the publisher posts a new entry to the feed they also send a notification to the hub the hub then Pushs that notification out to all the subscribers who are registered with that feed.

The Pubsubhubsub Syndication Model

This can all happen in milliseconds and allows the subscriber to see new posts to a feed nearly the instant it is added. So for comment feeds on a blog, news posts or even Twitter like services, you can see all the updates right away.

As far as I know this does not work both ways yet, so no instant return postings. But this is early days and I am sure that will come eventually.

Install in WordPress Today!
Please remember everything is very early in development, so use at your own risk.

Currently the only sites that support this protocol are FeedBurner and FriendFeed, but if you use Feedburner this is an important update just because it instantly updates your Feedburner feed when you post. If you use Feedburner without this service then you add Feedburners latency on top of the subscriber latency.

When I set out to update my WordPress themes I actually was getting ready to do some hacking and plugin development, but it seems I have been beaten too it. There is actually already two WordPress plugins that adds Pubsubhubbub to your feeds, and pretty much set it up for you.

These are the two plugins I am currently using:

1. PubSubHubbub by Josh Fraser: This plugin modifies your feeds to let your subscribers know which hub you are using, and also notifies the hub when you post new items.
2. FD Feedburner Plugin by John Watson: This plugin forwards your feeds to your FeedBurner urls. In theory Pubsub should work with regular feeds just as well (maybe better?) but I already had Feedburner setup and did not want to uninstall everything for testing.

After you have all that setup you will have to change a setting in your FeedBurner feeds. Under “Publicize” you will need to enable “PingShot” which tells FeedBurner to use push notifications.

You can follow the install instructions for the plugins and use the Pubsubhubsub site for more up to date information.

Once you get everything working when you add a new post to your WordPress site you should be able to refresh your FeedBurner page and see the post immediately. Then as new sites add support they will receive push notifications from FeedBurner and get update right away too.

Wrap Up

This has been one of my longest posts ever, but it makes me excited when I think about what Wave and projects like PubSub are trying to do to the internet. These kind of architectures are really starting to show some glimpses of what we have in store, and I think it is an exciting time for geeks and Internet users alike.

It seems that Google has already patented that functionality, and I am not sure how I feel about that.

First I hate patents on basic user interfaces like this. I mean this is an evolutionary design change, just a small step forward build on many other design ideas in all the other browsers. Now Google patents it. Maybe they will not enforce it, maybe they will.

As a programmer (I think I can still call myself that even though I have not coded in a while ) I think I see writing code more like creative writing that I do building a product. Some great pieces of code can look more like poetry than just a method for making a computer do something.

When people file for patents on code, ideas or methods of doing things it seems more like patenting Shakespeare. Then saying no one can write a love story like Romeo and Julliet every again because that story has been patented. If they do then they can be sued and forced to pay royalties.

At first I was angry at Google, but then I started thinking about it. If Google does not patent it, then Microsoft or Apple probably will. If Microsoft or Apple get their grubby little hands on anything then they hold onto it so tight the whole idea will probably stagnate for years. Much like when Microsoft patented browser plug-ins and everyone had to work around it with less elegant solutions for a long time.

I would rather have Google own the patent than most other companies, but the problem is noone should have to patent anything like this. It just stifles creativity and slows progress. If I wanted to code some extension for Firefox that creates a unified address bar I would not think twice about even starting it. Would I be forced to remove the extension in the future? Could I be sued for it?

In the end I think it all comes back to our badly broken patent system more than Google filing this particular patent. I wonder if the open source community could form a patent group and start file patents just to protect them from other corporations?

Hopefully smarter people than me can figure something out to fix this, because it’s very frustrating as a developer to always have to worry that the simplest piece of code you are developing might be patented already.

In Firefox when you start typing you get a list of suggestions from your history and bookmarks. But you have to physically select an item from the list using the arrow keys and enter, or the mouse.

In Chrome as soon as you start typing a similar list appears, however the closest match is automatically displayed in the address bar. If that is the address you are looking for you just hit enter, if not you keep typing a few more key strokes until the site you want pops up. If your site does not popup you can hit enter at anytime and it will take you straight to search results.

This seems like a minor thing, but when you compare good browsers these days it comes down to the smaller less obvious things. The good browsers are standards compliant already, so rendering websites is not a problem. So you are left with load speed, resource usage and user interface.

Another thing I like is the minimalist interface. When you run Chrome you will notice that there is no status bar at the bottom of the window. That is until you load a new page, or download a file. When a status message is needed like “Loading Page…” a little box pops up at the bottom of the window. If something you need to click on is beneath the box you can just move you mouse to the box and it will slide out of the way.

If you download a file another bar pops up with your latest downloads listed. You can then easily open the file directly from Chrome, or reveal the file in Explorer.

I still love Firefox and I am looking forward to 3.5 with the new JavaScript engine. But I love the the fact that we now have a few options when it comes to quality web browsers these days. Which are arguably the most important application you run.

The release of Chrome is just great for all of us. Now that web standards are starting to become well… standard, for all browsers except for IE, the more browsers the better. With Chrome, Opera, and Safari all focusing heavily on performance Firefox is already starting to follow suite.

Chrome is good so far, and I hope it keeps moving along.

That may not sound like a lot by todays standards, but when you multiply nearly 0.5GB by all the GMail users you can see that Google is making significant push to add more storage. I wonder if this could be a prelude to an announcement that could rival Yahoo!’s recent move to unlimited storage?

UPDATE 12/22/07: Looks like Google really was increasing the storage. Ever since this post the storage on GMail has been going up much faster than in the past. Currently my account is quickly approaching 6GB.

Still not unlimited like Yahoo!, but obviously Yahoo! does not really provide unlimited storage for every user. It’s more of a marketing gimmick. I actually respect Google a little more for not jumping in and saying the same thing.

This is a review of the Labs version of Google reader. Applications in Google Labs are not considered by Google to be ready for full release and use, so they are probably missing features, and functionality that will be added at the time of it’s full release. So this article is a just look at the early release.

What is Google Reader?

Google Reader is a RSS Feed Aggregator, which is basically a program that pulls data from multiple sources automatically and displays that data all in one place. In this case the data being aggregated are posts on all your favorite websites. These programs allow you to quickly read articles on many websites all at one without having to visit each website individually.

When you first login to Google Reader there is not much there, you have to add feeds to it before anything will happen. If you are using Firefox then adding feeds is incredibility easy, just browse to your favorite website and click on the little orange