So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.

So now I am back to designing/coding/using WordPress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.

I actually only started using FriendFeed on Saturday, but just from a few hours of use I was quite impressed by what it lets you do. The whole site feels very “instant” unlike many other sites that rely on RSS feeds, or even Twitter requires refreshing and polling every minute or so.

The biggest thing I am worried about though, it that FriendFeed seems to be a bit of a testing playground for developing social technology. For example, in my earlier post about Google Wave tech they are the first site to use the Pubsubhubbub to get instant updates from RSS feeds. If FriendFeed goes away it seems like the tech savy crowd it currently has, and the more bleeding edge environment might go away.

What I Hope Happens

Hopefully Facebook will be smart about this, they should leave the FriendFeed website alone and allow the team to continue development there. They should just try to focus on integrating some of the more real-time stuff into Facebook like the instant comments and great aggregation features of FriendFeed.

It just seems like it would be a mistake to dismantle the FriendFeed community when it is such a good place for development to continue and new technology to emerge.

Also, by keeping FriendFeed separate hopefully we will not be subjected to all the questionable ToS agreements Facebook comes up with.

This could be a great thing for everyone, it could mean that Facebook is finally opening up a little. Lets hope it works out like that.

Digg.com adds Sponsored Stories!

Today for the first time I seen a Sponsored story on Digg. It makes it to the front page with only 4 or 5 votes. This is too much now. We already have to put up with the flash ads popping up on each page and now companies can pay to get their stories on the front page.

It’s not there all the time, it pops up randomly when you visit. But this is not a good sign for the direction Digg is taking. I know they have to make money, but this seems like a line that they should not cross. In my mind it’s like a news paper selling articles to corporations and letting them write the material.

Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.

However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.

I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.

For example, the @ symbol is used to show that a Tweet is directed at a person. @veronica for example shows that your Tweet is directed at Veronica Belmont. The hash symbol (#) is used to signify Tags or important terms in your post. These conventions were not invented by Twitter, but they could still be useful in other situations.

The idea of giving my website a little extra context to the data I am submitted, and having it do interesting and powerful things is a really cool premise for me. For example, I currently have a “Tags” box right above this post I am writing. But as you can tell for my posts I rarely plan out what I am going to say, let alone write a list of keywords that describe the post. So this box is often filled with less than ideal meta data for my post.

It would be very nice to just put a hash tag in front of any terms I feel are important in the post and have the interpretor pull those tags out of the post. The tags could then be displayed differently, either with the hash or without, or a link to that tags filter.

Implementing the @ symbol would be a little more challenging, but would also be very fun. For example, @Slashdot could automatically pull a link to Slashdot.org from an internal lookup table. It could even try to determine the best kind of link. When using @veronica the interpretor could figure out that I mean veronica @ twitter.com.

Figuring out how to do all that if for another day, I am just mulling over ideas and flushing they out a little.

Performance/Stability

I watch a lot of Flash based video, twit.tv is running a lot when I am working. When I am watching video I often notice stuttering, even though the video is quite low bit rate. The stuttering mostly only occurs when I browse to another page in another tab or the system does something else. But we are meant to be multi-tasking here! That’s why I bought two monitors.

At first I thought it might be a Windows 7 issue, but I have some severe stuttering in OSX as well. Even when I am doing nothing else and just downloading the YouTube video.

Sound will often cut out completely when I load another tab that has other flash elements in it. Then the only way to get the sound back is to restart Firefox.

I narrowed the problem to Firefox by using the basic process of elimination technique.

• System Performance: I played several videos from Revision 3 as high def Quicktime movies (around 600MB each), both streaming and local, in a window and full screen. No stuttering at all while multi-tasking.
• Network Connection: Streamed HD movies in non-flash formats, from other computers. Played flash movies in other browsers. They all had no problems with my 20mbs down connection
• Operating System: Same problem in XP, 2007RC on the same hardware, and OSX on a MacBook Pro 13.3″

So it is nearly certain in my mind now that Firefox is the main culprit here. Flash is obviously a big problem just because it still does not have graphics acceleration etc, but we have no choice with Flash.

Speed

The Firefox team has done a good job improving performance in 3.5 when loading pages etc. However as soon as you load Chrome up again you see a noticeable difference in speed. Obviously this is my subjective view, but everything just seems snappier in Chrome.

User Interface

I have said it before, and I will say it again. The Google address bar in Chrome is the best UI invention to come to browsers in a very long time. The way it intelligently figures out what you want as soon as you start typing is great.

For example, I type “twit” and if I hit enter it will automatically take me to http://www.twit.tv because that is currently my most visited site that has twit in it. Other options are Google Search (or search of your choice) for “twit”, then “twitter.com”, and a link to an article I bookmarked about twitter development.

Why have a separate “Quick Search” box when you already have an address bar right there.

Conclusion

For now I am back using Chrome for everyday browsing and general use. It’s a real shame because I do feel a lot of loyalty to Firefox because the opened the door for all these browsers like Chrome, Opera and Safari to get a foot in the door. They were not the first alternative browser, but they were the first to start taking some share back from the IE monopoly.

Compilation is good, and hopefully Firefox will strive to make their system faster in future releases. They need to do some Snow Leopard like releases that mainly focus on performance, streamlining features and interface, and performance again!.

For me social sites do not spell the doom of blogs, but an opportunity for blogs to change into something more useful. The blog should become the hub for all your personal information. tweets, blog posts, flicker photos, del.icio.us links, calendar events, forum posts, blog comments which are all scattered across the net. The blog can act as the catch all for all your online content.

Google Wave seems to be making some moves in this direction, by allowing content from many sources to be consolidated into once feed. Wave, from what I have seen in videos, is more of a personal information manager and is not used as your public face to the world.

Imagine your blog that consolidates all your tweets, flicker photos, comments posted on other blogs/forums/websites, or videos. By leveraging the other social sites like twitter and Flickr blogs should be the central place for people to find everything you publicly post.

Of course, most people to not need this they will be perfectly happy with a facebook page or a twitter feed. For people with several accounts on many different sites or who already have blogs they should still be the center of their public information. Hopefully for a long time to come.

Then I jumped to my Mac and installed the plug-in in Firefox for Mac, logged into XMarks and synced the book marks up. Everything worked great… then I went to Safari.

After downloading the installer, which I did not like right off the bat, and installing the plug-in I was forced to logout and back in (essentially a reboot) then Safari refused to load complaining about a plug-in framework that failed to load. XMarks still worked, and synced the bookmarks, but I could not browse anything without Safari locking up.

I also hated the fact that XMarks installed a system icon in my system tray (sorry forgot the Mac term for the system tray) a browser plug-in should not require a permanently running app in the background.

Also, the fact that the actual plug-in did not even work in Safari is a problem. So I un-installed it immediately.

I am still happy with it for Firefox, but I think they might have been premature in removing the “Fox” part of their name. Because they are obviously still mainly a Firefox application.

It seems that Safari’s plug-in architecture might be to blame too, I just hope that the Chrome version is alot better when it’s release.

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.

Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It’s so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.

As I recently posted I bought a Macbook Pro, and have been using Firefox as the main browser in OS X. So now using extentions like XMarks or the in development Weave Project to keep all my bookmarks and links together.

Firefox 3.5 so far seems like a good upgrade and has once again taken the thrown of default browser on both my systems. Hopefully this fierce competition will continue, and leave IE even further in their dust.