Utah Open Source Planet

I feel that a status update is long overdue, but as the corpus of Windmill tests grows, so does the time it takes to run a complete instance of the regression suite. However, I do have some fun progress to report as well as a few questions/problems that are showing themselves now that all the fluff is over. First, let’s talk about the fun stuff!

I do have 3 of my major improvements/fixes/restructures to django.test somewhat complete. At the moment they are lacking most in documentation, a problem I intended to rectify later this week.

1. Windmill Tests: Windmill test runners are nearly complete, threaded development server for AJAX widget testing complete.
2. Code Coverage: Coverage.py support for runtests.py and management command. Extensible system is easily pluggable with other coverage systems.
3. Test-Only Models: This is still a topic of discussion, but adding the property ‘test_models’ to a TestSuite will load and wipe the models. Has tests and limited docs.

My major TODO’s still outstanding:

• Documentation!
• Twill Runner Support (Utilizing the Windmill Threaded Server)
• Windmill Admin Regression Tests (Healthy set of tests written, need to document and finish more)
• Skip tests that are known to fail
• Test new features/API’s

That’s it for now, more updates are available on the django-dev list!

May was a busy month, and not in a “fast-track-to-finish-dissertation” kind of way. I zoomed to Florida for a family reunion, then zoomed across the country to San Fransisco for an interview at Facebook, then the next week zoomed over to NYC for an interview at Google in their Manhattan office. Then, lest the last week in May should feel left out, I zoomed up to Utah for an interview with AST. As May drew to a close and June entered the scene, I found myself with four offers of employment, including Google and Facebook (Boeing just did a phone interview). Wow! I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Now dear casual reader from yonder internet, I know what you’re thinking. It’s exactly what I would have thought a few months ago. “No-brainer. Work for Google.” But I found myself perplexingly unable to decide between Google and Facebook. It didn’t help that Google was in New York and my wife wasn’t keen on New York, and that the Google position offered was a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) which is, to grossly oversimplify, a glorified systems programmer. Not faced with an attractive competing offer like the one from Facebook, I’d have been headed to Manhattan to be an SRE in a heartbeat. But as it was I was torn.

I applied for the Facebook position on a whim. I had been on Facebook only a month or two and I noticed an ad on the side about how they were hiring. I clicked on it, looked at their careers page for awhile, liked what I saw, and decided to apply for a Machine Learning Engineer position. I came home and told my wife, who was instantly convinced I had lost my marbles. She is not a programmer, so how could she know that although I’m not a big social network guy and had only grudgingly signed up for Facebook a month or two before, I could be intensely interested in working on such a site.

Theoretically speaking, I love networks, and that includes graph theory, computer networks, and yes even social networks. I knew Facebook problems would be about networks and about scale. They would be hard problems. They would be fun problems. The perks page looked good, and I think it would be fun to be in Silicon Valley. So I applied.

Facebook called and had me do one of their pre-screening programming puzzles (you can enjoy them even if you’re not being considered for employment). I got a little obsessed and did 3 over the better part of a week. Then there was a phone screen, and then the invitation to interview on-site (This all happened over several weeks time, of course, and more or less in parallel with a similar process for Google, except that Google didn’t have a puzzle step).

I’ll skip to the end, lest I bore you. Facebook continually impressed me the more I interacted with them and the more I saw. I was similarily surprised at how enjoyable, useful, and private Facebook was as a user since I had signed up. Facebook skyrocketed from just another one of those pesky social networking sites to a daily habit and potential employer in a few short months.

Still, it can’t compare to Google right? Well, actually they try very hard to compare to Google. It’s quite obvious that most of the perks and benefits are directly inspired by Google’s, compensation was comparable, and I found that they have smart people working on hard problems just like Google. In addition, there are two things they have that Google doesn’t anymore: they’re still small and they’re pre-IPO. Of course, Google has more smart people and Facebook is more-or-less a one-trick pony. Publishing would probably be easier at Google. Here I go again… I was back and forth for a solid week. It drove me and my wife crazy. I talked to people at Facebook who had been at Google (at my request). I talked to people at Google. I talked to friends and family. I tried every decision making trick in the book. Both sides sweetened the deal a bit to make it easier for me to choose them (Google switched the offer to be in Mountain View as a Software Engineer, Facebook offered a bit more money). I just couldn’t make up my mind.

Well finally I did, and this is what it came down to: time off, impact, and stock.

Although both were generous with paid time off (PTO) compared to most US companies, Facebook offered more, especially in the area of paternity leave (my wife is expecting). As much as I anticipate enjoying either job, I enjoy being at home or on vacation with my family more.

Facebook is small—they’re hiring like crazy because they’re smaller than they want to be. Because of that, I feel that my wacky background in system administration, agileish pragmatic open-source programming, and high-brow CS theory and research would be more broadly brought to bear than in some team at Google responsible for some small part of one of the many wonderful Google products. I would have more impact—not on the world at large but on the thing that we are doing. Then there’s also the draw of quick seniority in a small and fast-growing company.

Finally, although both companies offered restricted stock units to vest over 4 years, Facebook’s offering has the potential to be worth several times what Google’s offering would. Or, Facebook’s offering could be worth about what Google’s would be. Or, in a really really bad scenario, worth less. I ran the numbers, pulled some probabilities out of the air, and decided at least as good as Google and possibly much better was the most likely scenario. Since they’re RSUs and not options, the only risk is in making less extra cash than I would have made at the other company. Google was the safer choice, Facebook the more potentially lucrative. I tried to leave this out of the decision making process as much as possible, because I didn’t want my decision to be about money. I wanted it to be about the work. But I have to admit there’s a draw here.

I believe more strongly now than I did before that Google is a fantastic place to work, and I would reapply there in a heartbeat down the road if my path takes me there. I wish I could just be in two places at once and work at both, at least long enough to know for sure where I really want to be. But life doesn’t work that way. I’ve decided to take the path that seems the most exciting and unsure out of a sheer sense of adventure. Google will be there in a few years if I want to reapply, and they may even want me then as they do now. The time to really make a difference at Facebook is now, while they’re small.

You may think I’m crazy to turn down Google. I think that sometimes too. One thing is certain: the next few years will be an amazing adventure that I never dared dream would come to me. Thanks to everyone who has helped me to this point in my life, especially my loving and supportive wife and kids, my parents who taught me to love learning, and my brothers who “let” me hog the computer when we were young (ha!).

Well, I think I have a dissertation lying around here that needs finishing.

I just got word that Google has released a Developer Preview for their browser, Google Chrome. I have not had time to test it on my Linux machine yet, but I have installed in on OS X and it is working great so far! There are bugs, of course. The limitations are mentioned at the download page, but overall it has been working like a champ.

I love that Google released a browser, and not just any browser, but a browser that redefines how browsers should work from the bottom up. I also love that Google doesn’t limit this offering to a single operating system, but shares it with everyone. Granted it has been a while since the Windows-only release, but this really shows that they *have* been working on it, and now have something to offer us.

If you’d like to see some basic screenshots (again, I have not tested this on my Linux machine, only OS X) you can visit my other blog. In the meantime, here is a link to the dirty details and downloads.

Early Access Release Channels: Chromium (Google Chrome Downloads)

Enjoy!

Other Points of Interest

• June 15, 2008 — How To Install Flock Browser v1.2 on Ubuntu 8.04 (2)

Among all the excitement of the past few weeks, the start of GSOC appears to have snuck up on me! Started work today on the coverage runner. My progress is easily followed on my GitHub Django fork (until we get real SVN branches). Can’t wait to start posting some real results!

So my Google Summer of Code: 2009 project proposal was accepted! I will be working on a 2 phase project revolving around Django’s testing framework, and regression suite. Most notebly, I plan to:

• Implement Windmill test coverage for Django’s Infamous contrib.admin
• Provide several missing features/conveniences to the Django testing tools

While it may not be the most glamorous project, I’m excited for it! When paired with my epic mentors, (the ever-infamous Eric Holscher and notorious George Song) it looks to be a solid summer. You can expect me to post weekly status updates here, as well as anything else relevant to the project. As my ‘get to know Django and make sure I can conform with coding standards etc.’ ticket, I’m planning to add an assertion which checks for dead links after template rendering. Or, as its better known, Django Ticket #5418.

I want to also give a quick thanks to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Eric Holscher, Jannis Leidel and all the other PyCon 2009 Sprinters who helped me create the proposal.

I like bzr. Those of us that do (like bzr) aren’t quite as popular as the git lovers and as a result, we don’t see tools as fantastic as Rietveld, Github and Git-CL being spread around on domains outside of launchpad.net. While this isn’t the end of the world, it certainly represented a hurdle when I decided that I was going to formalize my code review process for internal projects. 

While most applications have some form of bzr support, its generally pretty broken or outdated. Given that I was going to have to write code no matter what application I chose, I figured I would use my favorite: Rietveld. Rietveld already had a tool supporting Git and Hg, so expanding it to support bzr was a straightforward task. The initial patch is awaiting review at http://codereview.appspot.com/14053  so please share your thoughts/opinions. If there are others who start to use this, then I might consider packaging this functionality into a bzr plugin! 

If you just want to take advantage of bzr support, then download the file here: Upload.py

Image via Wikipedia

An old friend from Excite@Home, Jeff Huber was quoted in the NY Times on Google's product marketing strategy and the issue of data privacy:

"We do have a philosophy that our products should speak for themselves. We tend not to make a lot of noise," said Jeff Huber, senior vice president for engineering at Google.

As always with Google, the price point is appealing: zero, if you don't count the amount of personal data that I am trading for all that utility. With Google, it is always simple, and any engineer will tell you that simple is hard. There had been a lot of talk within Google about creating video chat as a PC-only application, a much easier endeavor for the company, but it would not have been simple for the consumer.

If Google owns me, it's probably because I am in favor of what works.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who was in New York last week. "We want a little bit of Google in many parts of your life."

Mission accomplished, at least on my desktop, but I asked Mr. Schmidt if I shouldn't be worried that I am putting all of my digital eggs in one multicolored, goofy-lettered basket.

"That depends on what you think of our company and our values," he said. "Do you believe we have good values?"

Mr. Schmidt seems nice enough, but I sometimes wonder if I will come to regret the easier, softer road I have chosen. A record of my surfing lives on its servers for 18 months --- not by name, but still. Google continues to insist that my IP address is not me, but a motivated government with a subpoena in hand could find me, lots of me, on Google's servers.

Most data privacy experts would call me a fool to index my life into any one company so deeply, and diversification in all matters is just common sense.

Mr. Huber countered that I am free to come and go as I wish.

"The nice thing is that we don't force you to use only our stuff," he said. "It is not tied tightly together, and the content is all easily exportable. If you feel like we are letting you down, or you don't like our products or we are failing to innovate, you can pick up and go where you want."

From The Media Equation - Google Seduces With Utility - NYTimes.com
Referenced Mon Nov 24 2008 07:04:42 GMT-0700 (MST)

Interesting when your SVP of engineering is speaking about your marketing strategy to the Times.

Tags: google marketing engineering product+management

Dave Winer

Dave Winer wrote yesterday about the death of online advertising. He says:

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

From Online advertising is now dead (Scripting News)
Referenced Fri Nov 14 2008 08:02:18 GMT-0700 (MST)

I don't know that I'd go as far as saying it will not come back at all, but merchants will find new, innovative ways to reach customers without advertising when their budgets get tight.

Of course, we might call these new things "advertising." I get that frequently when I explain what Kynetx does. People call any message from a merchant an advertisement even though, in many cases, it's not widely broadcast.

There were plenty of discussions relevant to Dave's post at IIW this week. The VRM crowd was there in force with grounded discussions about how the implicit contract between merchant and shopper can be rewritten in ways that are better for both.

Most exciting to me, the discussions about r-buttons were getting down to the level where you could see real protocols and standards developing behind the talk.

I was troubled by some VRM discussions that still see to border on being hostile to merchants and even commercial efforts in general. I think that only hurts the opportunity to have to redefine what commerce is and how it takes place. I also think that some of the discussion gets lost in relationships in general, not just those that exist between the merchant and shopper. Nothing wrong with figuring out infrastructure for relationships, but it's nice to keep things focused on the task at hand.

The next steps we take can be as important as the final end state. Dave's insight that the economic downturn opens up opportunity is a good one. At Kynetx we're working on new ways for shoppers and merchants to relate. We're creating new channels for relevant messages--both from shopper to merchant and from merchant to shopper. Not advertising--just plain old communication.

Tags: ads google ecommerce iiw vrm kynetx

For the last few days whenever I and others at the office do a Google search, we get redirected to google.es. I noticed today that I'm seeing Google Ad Sense ads in Spanish as well. I don't think it's something on my configuration, machine, or profile because it only happens at the office and happens to others as well.

The office IP is 74.81.253.227 which Maxmind thinks is in Utah (because it is). But assuming that Google is making the decision based on GeoIP, they clearly don't.

Does anyone know whether Google is indeed making these decisions based on GeoIP and how you can correct their data once they get it wrong. Updating the "preferred language" and other preferences doesn't make any difference. You can force Google to go to the .com site, but it only lasts for a single session then you're right back to google.es and Spanish language ads.

Tags: google geolocation

Walt Mossberg, the technology reviewer for the Wall Street Journal has a review of the G1, sometimes known as the gPhone. The G1 is Google's competitor to the iPhone. He says:

I have been testing the G1 extensively, in multiple cities and in multiple scenarios. In general, I like it and consider it a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Both devices run on fast 3G phone networks and include Wi-Fi. Both have smart-touch interfaces and robust Web browsers. Both have the ability to easily download third-party apps, or programs.

But the two devices have different strengths and weaknesses, and are likely to attract different types of users.

If you've been lusting after the iPhone's functionality, but didn't like its virtual keyboard or its user interface or its U.S. carrier, AT&T;, the G1 may be just the ticket for you. But it does have some significant downsides.

By far, the G1's biggest differentiator is that it has a physical keyboard, which is revealed by sliding open the screen. The keyboard proved only fair in my tests, with keys that are too flat and that can be hard to see in bright light, and with a bulge in the body on the right side that you have to reach over to type. But, for the many people who can't stomach typing on glass, the G1 keyboard will be a welcome sight. It's complemented by a BlackBerry-like trackball for navigation.

From Google Answers the iPhone | Walt Mossberg
Referenced Thu Oct 16 2008 09:51:29 GMT-0600 (MDT)

I'm very excited to see the G1 come out. Competition for the iPhone can only make it and similar products better.

Tags: g1 google mossberg phones iphone

I thought it interesting that the Google 2001 index had only 671 search results for “Barack Obama“.

“Sarah Palin” had 0 results.

These old indexes are interesting, especially if you’re searching for old data. I hope we see more of them.

Ok, I don’t want a long rant about this, but 2 things that bother me. 

1. We never care about EULA’s. Why care about this one? It’s an open source project so even the most absurd clause ever in the EULA is effectively unenforceable. Stop whining, let the lawyers tell us what it means and stop speculating when your an engineer or journalist and not a lawyer.
2. It’s not ‘Apple’s Webkit’ I hate that a great open source project with a lot of companies and contributors behind it gets completely attributed to Apple. While I appreciate that not everyone is going to get credit in every sentence, can we offer some semblance of recognition that Apple is not the only organization working on the Webkit platform? 

Ok, thats all, just wanted to get it out of my system.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the new search engine on the block:  Cuil.  It’s rumored to be fast, quick, and index sites better than Google.  I’m all for anything that works well, and I love to test media hype.  So, I thought I would give Cuil a try.  

Cuil is the old Irish word for Wisdom, and that is how they bill their search.  The site is designed well on it’s home page, just like Google.  They provide just a simple search, with no visible advertisements that I can see.  So that brings up the first question:  how do they make money?  Not quite sure on that.  

The results are not as simple, but you do get more information per result than with Google.  I wouldn’t call it “mobile” friendly though, as it posts a large text snippet and images that are relevant to the search.  Google, on the other hand, has a small text snippet and no images.  Personally, I like the larger text snippet because you get a better idea on the relevancy of the search result.  

One thing that takes some getting used to is viewing multiple results.  If searching for names (I did a search for myself to see what comes up), close matches that are ranked higher show up on the first page to the Left under various categories.  But it took me a little while to realize that additional search results could be navigated at the bottom left corner of the page.  Though I could figure it out eventually, it takes the “first page results are the only results” a bit too far.  Perhaps if the navigation was at the bottom right.  After all, the human eye, while reading a web page, will naturally move from the Top Left to the Bottom Right, and stay there.  

Also, my new Blog was not indexed at all, apparently.  I couldn’t find any mention of it, nor of my other recent domains.  This brings up questions regarding the search engine bot being used.  Cuil uses a search engine bot named Twiceler, and you can get your site indexed by sending them an email.  As I tell my students who are interested in Search Engine Optimization, even if they are only 5% of your search, do what you can.  Don’t alienate anyone from your marketing strategy.  

So, do I think Cuil is better than Google at indexing?  Not right away.  I think their web crawler needs a bit more work in following links and such, but with them being so new on the block, perhaps it is just that the crawler just hasn’t had enough time to process everything.  

But the other question is, do I think Cuil is bette at displaying the results?  Yes, I do.  Perhaps it’s because I’m of a Celtic heritage and therefore biased, but I really like the display overall.  I think that Cuil has a lot of potential, once the crawler has time to index enough of the web to make it as large as Google.  

Has anyone else out there tried Cuil?  What do you think?

So apparently its only a monolopy at 90% share if its against Microsoft according Brad Smith one of Microsof’t’s top lawyer (according to the article)  So Microsoft is all up in arms that it isn’t fair that Google and Yahoo can have a deal that would supposedly give them 90% market share.

This leaves me wondering.  So, typically people claim well Microsoft it the better product why else would they have ~90% market share.  References you ask…  Well you’re in luck.

(Some dates are old)

Wikipedia ~90%

WindowsITPro  ~93%

OneStat.com ~97.5%

Market Share by Net Applicatoins ~91%

Yes I know this isn’t the greatest list or maybe even a good list, but well you get the idea.  If you have better links or to the contri then post them in a comment.

Google's reliability strategy is to buy cheap hardware with no reliability features and create reliable clusters from them because no problem Google wants to solve fits on a single machine anyway.

The Google File System (GFS) is a cluster file system with a familiar interface, but not POSIX compliant. Bigtable is a distributed database system. This has a custom interface, not SQL. There are 100's of instances of each of these cells scaling in to 1000's of servers and petabytes of data.

in the GFS, a master manages metadata. Data is broken into chunks (64Mb) and multiple copies (typically three) of a chunk are stored on various machines. The master also handles machine failures. Failures are frequent when you use lots of commodity hardware. Checksumming detects errors, replication allows for recovery. This all happens automatically. Higher replication is used for hotspots.

Most data is in two formats:

• RecordIO - sequence of variable sized records
• SSTable - sorted sequence of key/value pairs

BigTable is built on top of GFS. Lots of semi-structured data ordered by URL, user-id, geographic locations. The size of the data sets varies widely (e.g. page data vs sat-image data).

Tables are broken into tablets. These are treated as chunks for replicating in GFS. When a tablet gets too big, it's broken in two. Tablets go into SSTables in GFS.

Scale is important. Envisioning how to create exabyte systems. The systems need to be more and more automated. The number of systems is growing faster than Google can hire.

Tags: storage google scaling velocity08

Just yesterday, Facebook announced their second F8 conference, to occur July 23, 2008. This Developer-targeted event is said to possibly include some major announcements, including the new Profile redesign, more information about the fbOpen platform, and most significantly, possibly the launch of their E-Commerce platform. What hasn’t been announced or shared however is the odd timing of the event.

The event occurs right smack dab in the middle of O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, scheduled to occur for about the past year now from July 21 through July 25. This conference is known as an essential “Mecca” for Open Source developers around the globe, and has presentations from such players as Google, MySQL, Sun, Meebo, and even SixApart. Everyone who is a developer (unless you solely develop for Microsoft) or Sysadmin will be at this conference.

As a developer, this is tough news to hear that Facebook will make me choose between OSCON and them. Frankly, I would by default choose OSCON if I were any smart developer, as I would get more. So why isn’t Facebook just joining OSCON and doing an “F8″ track there? Do they really want to tick off Open Source developers? You better bet that OpenSocial will have a presence there. If Facebook really wanted to target the Open Source crowd, as they have “claimed” to do with their fbOpen Platform and a few other contributions back to the community, they would try to have a presence at this conference and not interrupt it as they are currently doing. I was actually going to go to OSCON to promote my FBML Essentials book to potential Facebook developers for O’Reilly. Now I’m forced with a decision. I’ve contacted Facebook with no response, and I’m getting a little frustrated as a Social Media developer. Which conference will you choose?

As the first entry to my Social Coding series I’m going to cover Google’s Social Graph API. I saw a demo of this at Google I/O in San Francisco and was so impressed that I immediately started hacking on it when I got home. Little did I know how powerful this API was and how much information it could pull off the web about a single individual!

Google’s Social Graph API takes a cache of the rich storage of links, information, and URLs on Google’s servers, and determines which of those contain information about actual people. It combines OpenID for confirming an individual’s identity, and XFN and FOAF XML protocols to determine links between those identities. With a simple <link/> tag on a user’s website, a user can determine other websites that also identify them. If you link to one URL identifying that location as you, and at the linked website, it links back to you, Google can tell for sure both of those websites are yours, and identify you as a person. Not only that, but you can similarly provide XFN information or FOAF information via similar <link/> tags or a separately linked file identifying who your friends are. If they link back to you via similar metadata Google can tell for sure that the two of you are friends.

The Social Graph API lives and breaths this data. There are actually quite a few Social networks that use this protocol to identify you and your friends. Sites like Digg, Twitter, and FriendFeed all utilize these protocols to identify your friends. The Google Social Graph API scans this data and organizes it in an easy way for you, as a developer, to access.

Let’s try a simple example, and you don’t even have to be a developer to try it. Google has provided a simple playground to see how the Social Graph API works. If you go to http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/exploreapi.html, enter in a few URLs of your blogs, social networking profiles, and other identifying locations on the web, leave “Follow ‘me’ Links”, “Pretty Output” checked, and click, “Find connections”. For me, just “twitter.com/jessestay” was all I needed to enter in the textarea.

The resulting structure is organized in a format called JSON - if you’re a Perl developer you might be familiar with this, as it is formatted the same way as a Perl Hash structure. You’ll see under “nodes” a bunch of URLs with different metadata about the URL - these are URLs that Google thinks, based on the metadata in the URL you provided, are you or contain info about you. I’ve found that only those with a “profile” attribute are actual Social Network profiles for yourself, so be sure to pay attention to those.

You can also go back and click “show inbound links” and “show outbound links” - this will then return URLs with links to sites you have identified as yourself, as well as sites you own that claim other sites as identifying for you. Play around with it - there’s a wealth of information it will give you about people!

Now, if you’re not a developer, you can skip over this next section because I’m going to get technical by showing an example. I’m a Perl developer so I’ll show one in Perl.

In Perl it’s simple - you need to install Net::SocialGraph with a command similar to this:

perl -MCPAN -e “install Net::SocialGraph”

Then, a bit of code like this will give you the data you need:

my $sg = Net::SocialGraph->new(’fme’ => 1);

my @urls = ();
push (@urls,’http://twitter.com/jessestay’);
push (@urls,’http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=683545112′);

my $res = $sg->get(@urls);
my @profiles = ();
foreach my $node (keys %{$res->{’nodes’}}) {
  if ($res->{’nodes’}->{$node}->{’attributes’}->{’profile’}) {
    push (@profiles, $res->{’nodes’}->{$node}->{’attributes’}->{’profile’});
  }
}

In the above example I instanciate my $sg object, telling it to follow “me” attributes in the response. I add a couple URLs to identify the individual I want profile information for (in this case, me), and then make the call to the SocialGraph API to go get my info based on those URLs with the “get” method provided by the API. Then, I just traverse the response and I can do whatever I want with it. After this, I could take the response information and list all of the user’s profiles as links, or perhaps I could scan those profiles for more information and provide information about each identified profile. You’ll also note that it’s not always correct so you’ll want to let the user intervene. Also, note I’m looking for only links with a “profile” attribute - I’ve found these to be most accurate.

Beyond that, that’s it. Ideally, you could take the Playground example above and look at the resulting URL. The basics of the Social Graph API are just that URL - plug in whatever you want and you’ll get back whatever information you need. You could then parse it with Javascript, Perl, PHP, or just leave it in the “pretty” format the Playground provides you by default.

Now, imagine taking that data and combining it with, say the Twitter API to pull out all of an individual’s friends on Twitter, then applying the Social Graph API to each of those individuals. Soon, you have a tool which can identify which of a user’s friends are on which networks, and if there are any of your friends you have not yet added on those networks. This API is powerful!

The Social Graph API can be an excellent utility to find out more information about any individual using your applications. No longer do you have to ask the individual for that information - so long as they are active on Web 2.0 that information can be provided for them to choose from!

You can learn more about the Social Graph API here.

Please note I too am new to this API - any inaccuracies in this document please let me know in the comments and I will correct them for others to benefit.

Android is looking pretty sweet.

Android Pacman looks good as well.

Pay attention - Google is onto something big, something that could very well change the world, and no, it’s not OpenSocial or App Engine or Android. One of the biggest overlooked items in the last several days has been an announcement by Google to release an API for their Google Health service. I’ve mentioned before that Google Health is one of the single biggest threats to the Healthcare Industry since the establishment of company-paid Health Insurance (well, maybe not in those words, but that’s what I meant).

The Google Health API does two things, for the most part. It allows a developer to retrieve medical profiles stored in Google, and format them as a “Continuity of Care Document”, a standard in the HealthCare Industry for sending HealthCare history information and data from HealthCare provider to HealthCare provider (a provider would be your doctor, or a hospital, or dentist). This allows your doctor’s systems that are already familiar with this system to easily read your history and process it accordingly so your doctor can read it.

Secondly, it allows you to send profile information from your own systems into Google Health. Through a simple post to Google’s servers, you can send history information via XML and it will get stored in Google’s servers. So, as a doctor you can hire a developer like me, and we’ll parse the information from your systems, and your customers can simply use their Google login to access not only the information you stored about their visit, but their entire history from previous doctors.

This is the start of something beautiful. Previously in order to send and receive medical data, it required a firm knowledge of pages and pages of HIPAA documents to know and understand, and at the same time know how to get the information, which could be in many different formats into, and out of your systems as a doctor. Now, Google is providing a single source, and a standard for developers to understand that will allow any developer to transfer data into, and out of a single source into your systems. Now you only have to know one standard as a Doctor and you can have that patient’s entire medical history with the push of a button. Google knows the standards so you don’t have to.

Google is in the position to take this much further. As the single destination source for consumers, they have the power to control standards, track payments, health issues, and more, and provide a single standard to do all this. I wouldn’t be sleeping very well right now if I were a HealthCare company. Google is in a position to take the power out of their hands and put it back in the consumer’s. Google is about to change the world of Healthcare as we know it.

I don’t know if it’s the horrible logistics at yesterday’s keynote and that I had to sit on the floor to watch it, or the T-Shirts that in binary say, “GoogleKO” (Mike, I’ll give you mine if you have lunch with me tomorrow), or maybe the fact that I now can’t get internet connectivity as I write this due to the poor planning for WiFi in this room. Or maybe it’s that I’m presenting on Facebook and have had Facebook on the mind the time I’ve been here, but I’ve really been on an anti-Google run lately and I’m not sure why.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed here at Google I/O is there is absolutely no presence of Jaiku at the event. I haven’t seen any booths, presenters are not running it up on the screens like we saw with Twitter at Web 2.0, and it almost seems as though Google doesn’t care that there is an opportunity with the problems Twitter is having right now. In fact, I think I’ve even seen Twitter on a few of the presenters boxes rather than Jaiku.

Does Google just not care about Jaiku? They have an amazing opportunity here. Twitter is down about one half of the time. They are hosting a blog on their competitor, Tumblr’s, site because they can’t trust their own servers by all means! I don’t agree that FriendFeed is a competitor to Twitter - Jaiku is, however, and now is the time for them to step up! Google has a conference with attendance that perhaps exceeds that of Web 2.0, and the whole world watching them as they make some serious announcements, so I can’t figure out why they aren’t taking this opportunity to gain an edge on their competitors.

Jaiku is perhaps the only other service out there with an SMS status update system similar to Twitter’s. People really want to find another solution that solves what Twitter gives them. Jaiku does this, and Google is failing seriously at promoting it and bringing attention to it at this conference.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be heading off to Google I/O at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I’m very excited to look over the various new technologies Google is offering, including OpenSocial, Google App Engine (keep an eye out for Bungee Labs, the competitor to App Engine - I hear they’re planning to make an appearance there), and hopefully I’ll get a first chance to play with Google FriendConnect. I’m hoping to take quite a bit back so I can apply it to the work I’m doing for Takes All Types to transition them over to OpenSocial.

While I’m out there, look out for me the next few nights. Tomorrow evening, probably late, I’ll be visiting the Wordpress 5th Anniversary at the Minna Gallery. That should be quite a fun event, and I look forward to meeting Matt Mullenweg and crew again. Then, Wednesday night, be sure to come out to the Silicon Valley Web Builders meeting, where I’ll be speaking to about 100-150 developers and such with an interest in Facebook and Social Media development. There, I’ll be speaking about a few tags you probably weren’t aware of in FBML, and we’ll go over some fun FBML facts, as well as discuss some of the latest news we’re seeing about Facebook lately. I also hear a local news reporter will be there, so the pressure is on. I’ll have a number of copies of my first book, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???” there for you to purchase, and I’m happy to autograph any copies you buy - if you haven’t yet RSVP’d please do so now!

The final event, Thursday night, is the Palo Alto Facebook Developers meeting. That meeting looks to be jam packed with developers, Facebook enthusiasts, and investors, from Jim Breyer, to Lee Lorenzen, to Justin Smith of InsideFacebook, to Dave Morin of Facebook, it seems anyone that has anything to do with Facebook will be there. They will be celebrating the 1 year platform anniversary, going over the new design and how that will affect developers. I anticipate some announcements out of that meeting, although I can’t say for sure.

So if your out in the area, stop by and say hi! I’m @jessestay on Twitter and FriendFeed - give me a holler and maybe we can go get some Thai or Seafood (my two favorite San Fran cuisines!) together. I look forward to seeing you all there!

I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell - your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” - if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few - let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

• Facebook
• OpenSocial
• Google Friend Connect
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pligg
• Digg
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Wordpress
• MoveableType
• Google App Engine
• Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward - I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me - I’d love to let you do a guest post.

Those that know me know that my last job before I went out on my own as an entrepreneur was with UnitedHealth Group working in their EDI Services division. While I was there I was following the interest Google had in Health Care with great curiosity. UnitedHealth Group (UHG) had many products Google could compete with, and perhaps at a better level. Google for the moment lacks a good, targeted audience in which to tap into the vast advertising money that could be provided by Pharmaceuticals and other Medical industry players. There is huge money in these areas of advertising, and I’m sure Google sees this as an opportunity (see the previous link - Google is definitely thinking about Health advertising!) they haven’t yet tapped into.

Today, Google launched the beta of their new Google Health product. Google Health competes right alongside UnitedHealth’s “Personal Health Histories” that they have provided to their customers. It allows you to easily provide your login credentials to about 20-30 HealthCare and Pharmaceutical providers, and import information from those providers into your Google Health Account. Not only that, but you can manually track health conditions and history of Doctors visits, medicine you are taking, hospital trips, and more, all through a simple login through your Google authentication credentials. All relying on the vast resources of hosting facilities and System Administrators protecting your data which Google has capability to provide.

Starting with Personal Health Histories, Google has the potential to do what UnitedHealth Group and others have been doing, but on a much larger, and unified scale. I would be willing to guess that a large majority of the internet has a Google account of some sort right now - imagine the possibilities!

For instance, what if Google were to integrate Google Calendar support into their interface? You could begin, just by importing your current medications, to receive alerts via text message and Google Calendar, reminding you to take your medication. Or perhaps your Doctor could integrate with Google Health to provide you with reminders and calendar entries of future appointments, as well as remind you when a Physical is due.

We’re just getting started though - now let’s take into account what Google is really good at - search. The project I was in charge of at UnitedHealth Group involved matching records between payers (the insurance companies) and providers (the doctors), an art that, thanks to our great government and the many rules and regulation they have already put into place but don’t follow themselves (called HIPAA), proved quite difficult. Many Insurance companies are making money off of this disunity and flaws in our Government’s system. Imagine if Google were to get into this game and start adding their own indexing algorithms to your medical records. In essence, Google themselves could become a “Clearing House” (a term in the Health Industry for basically a proxy/interpreter between payers and providers), sifting through claims and payments, matching them, and showing your bills, all through Google Health.

Imagine if your Doctor and your Health Insurance provider both join up to Google Health. All of the sudden, the two entities can understand each other and fewer errors will occur. Fraud will become less prevalent, and new standards will be established (if you call “Google” a standard). Ideally, your health care will become cheaper - I can see Doctors giving a discount if you maintain a Google Health Account because they can see more history and communicate with your provider better that way.

Now, imagine this - because Google is not a Insurance provider, they have an unbiased opportunity to show you some very interesting things. For instance, what if they started showing your payment histories to your Insurance provider vs. what the Provider was paying? They could begin to show customers how much more efficient it could be if they just went with a catastrophic insurance plan over their current plan, or how they could save money by just maintaining a Health Savings Account instead of paying a premium every month that goes nowhere. I can really see the potential of the Health Insurance companies getting cut out of the picture with the moves Google is making. Forget Universal HealthCare - Google will universalize it for us!

If Google can get their privacy issues out of the way, what if Google provided an opportunity to add in OpenSocial Support, allowing you, per privacy settings you set, to show the health histories of those you are related to (I can’t think of any reason to show this to just friends, but maybe you can). What if they provided a secure API to this, allowing other vendors, like Family History sites to have access to the data? Soon you’ll be able to track the health of your ancestors, and perhaps even track genetic reasons for the health issues you are having. I really think the possibilities are endless!

I think Google is onto something here - it is obviously another play in their world domination scheme, but with the position they have, why not? Maybe it’s the Libertarian in me, but Google may just revolutionize the Health Care Industry, without a need to turn to government here.

I’ve attempted to stay out of this until now because as Nick O’Neill implies, it’s pretty childish the way both the supporters and critics are handling this. I’m especially disappointed with the way Facebook is handling the Google Friend Connect issue. For those out of the loop, Facebook cancelled Google’s Friend Connect App on Facebook because, “it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service”. Facebook gave no examples of what sections of the Terms of Service Google was violating, nor did they explain why Google was wrong. This vaguely-presented move prevents Google from having a universal login and profile that includes Facebook.

Google responded today saying, “We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.” Google then proceeded to show detailed examples of the data they are retrieving from Facebook, how it is presented back to them, and the fact that they only share the URL of the user’s public photo with third party applications. They also stated that they only store data for 30 minutes at a time, after which they purge any of the above data cached on their servers.

I was impressed with Google’s response, and due to the openness and (apparent) honesty of it, I’m edging towards Google’s side on this, and quite scared as a Facebook developer on what Facebook could do with my own Apps. Assuming Google is right and not leaving anything out, Facebook could potentially remove any developer’s App from Facebook, no questions asked (although they did say they contacted Google multiple times about “something”), even though, per the developer’s understanding of the Terms of Service, the developer’s App follows the rules.

Based on what Google has said, I can’t see anything they did wrong in the development of their App that violates the Terms of Service. I really wish Facebook would explain further so we as developers could ensure our Apps aren’t doing the same. It also brings up many important questions as to what Facebook means when it comes to certain parts of the Terms of Service. I’m actually quite confused now as to what I can and can’t do on Facebook.

For example, Section 2a-6 in the Terms of Service, it states:

“You may retain copies of Exportable Facebook Properties for such period of time (if any) as the Applicable Facebook User for such Exportable Facebook Properties may approve, if (and only if) such Applicable Facebook User expressly approves your doing so pursuant to an affirmative “opt-in” after receiving a prominent disclosure of (a) the uses you intend to make of such Exportable Facebook Properties, (b) the duration for which you will retain copies of such Exportable Facebook Properties and (c) any terms and conditions governing your use of such Exportable Facebook Properties (a “Full Disclosure Opt-In”);”

Yet, in the section before that, it says I can only store indefinitely the uid, nid, eid, gid, pid, aid, notes_count, and profile_update_time. Does this mean I can or can’t get a user’s permission to store data on my servers? What about permanent session keys? I don’t see them in that list, yet the documentation seems to imply you need one to auto-authenticate a user. Am I breaking the developer ToS by storing a permanent session key?

Google is passing the public photo URL to third parties. Technically, because this is public information, it doesn’t even take a developer key to retrieve that URL. I could simply pull up the user’s profile page via their profile ID, and scrape the photo from the public profile. Is this really what’s causing Google to have their App removed? If so, I’m really scared as a Facebook App developer.

As you can see, the Facebook developer Terms of Service are simply too vague and too confusing for any developer to feel secure about keeping their App on the network. With actions like the one Facebook took against Google, I now have to question if my Apps too could be a target for Facebook to remove. If Google, who has hundreds of Lawyers on hand to look over such terms can’t figure out what they can and can’t do on the service, how can I, as a developer know what I can and can’t do on the service? Right now it’s a complete guessing game, with just the hope that Facebook will be decent enough to give you a warning before canceling your App. Is this really how we as developers should be developing our Apps?

I really hope Facebook can clarify this matter. I think after this move by Facebook, Facebook needs to clarify their Terms of Service for Developers and first, explain according to what violation in the Terms of Service Google’s App was removed, and second, break down in plain English what we as developers can and can’t do.

Facebook, Google laid out all their cards, at least as far as we can tell (and even if not they certainly laid out way more than Facebook did). How about not leaving us developers hanging and clarify all this once and for all? As a developer, I’m absolutely confused and scared at the moment of the very Walled Garden I make a living off of.

Photo courtesy CommonSpace.org

A friend of mine, Ali Akbar (@aliakbar), has made me aware of an interesting development going on with the domain he bought, googleappsengine.com (note the “s”). When he bought it, he approached me asking if I would be a blogger for the site, with intent to blog about Google App Engine news and announcements on the domain. He seemed quite excited about it, and, as a fan of Google App Engine, saw this as the perfect domain to write under since Google didn’t seem to be using it.

On Friday, without even time to set up the blog he was intending to create, Ali received the following very generic letter from Google (which he shared with me), asking him, in a very bullied fashion, without any offer to even make it right, to surrender the domain or face legal consequences:

Dear Sir/Madam:

Google is the owner of the well-known trademark and trade name GOOGLE, as well as the domain name GOOGLE.COM. As you are no doubt aware, GOOGLE is the trademark used to identify our award-winning search engine, located at www.google.com. Since its inception in 1997, the GOOGLE search engine has become one of the most highly recognized and widely used Internet search engines in the world. Google owns numerous trademark registrations and applications for its GOOGLE mark in countries around the world.

Google has used and actively promoted its GOOGLE mark for a number of years, and has invested considerable time and money establishing exclusive proprietary rights in the GOOGLE mark for a wide range of goods and services. As a result of its efforts, the GOOGLE mark has become a famous mark and a property right of incalculable value.

You have registered, without Google’s permission or authorization, the domain name googleappsengine.com (the ‘Domain Name’). The Domain Name is either confusingly similar to or incorporates the famous GOOGLE mark in its entirety, and, by its very composition, suggests Google’s sponsorship or endorsement of your website and correspondingly, your activities.

Your use of the Domain Name constitutes trademark infringement and dilution of Google’s trademark rights and unfair competition. Your use of the Domain Name is diluting use because it weakens the ability of the GOOGLE mark and domain name to identify a single source, namely Google. Further, your registration and use of the Domain Name misleads consumers into believing that some association exists between Google and you, which tarnishes the goodwill and reputation of Google’s services and trademarks. Moreover, your registration and use of the Domain Name is also actionable under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (’UDRP’). Under similar circumstances, Google has prevailed in numerous UDRP actions. These decisions are located online at www.icann.org/udrp/udrpdec.htm.

In view of your infringement of our rights, we must demand that you provide written assurances within 7 days that you will:

1. Immediately discontinue any and all use of the Domain Name;
2. Take immediate steps to transfer the Domain Name to Google;
3. Identify and agree to transfer to Google any other domain names registered by you that contain GOOGLE or are confusingly similar to the GOOGLE mark;
4. Immediately and permanently refrain from any use of the term GOOGLE or any variation thereof that is likely to cause confusion or dilution.

Sincerely,
The Google Trademark Team

What???!! “You have registered, without Google’s permission or authorization, the domain name googleappsengine.com (the ‘Domain Name’).” So wait - now I have to get Google’s permission before I get any name that even resembles the Google trademark?

I am astounded at the bullyish nature of this letter, and to assume that anyone that buys any name even resembling the Google trademark to be a violation against their trademark name. Google clearly hasn’t been very good at defending this in the past - just searching with their own search engine, I’m finding tons of examples of sites using the Google name in their own domain name (yes, I “Google’d” it):

googlefight.com
googlesystem.blogspot.com
googleguide.com
googlealert.com
googlerankings.com

The list just gets started from there…

Now, let me preface this with the fact that I am not a Lawyer, but I did learn this in Law class in college. The “Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy” which Google references can be found here, and in the document, it states:

c. How to Demonstrate Your Rights to and Legitimate Interests in the Domain Name in Responding to a Complaint. When you receive a complaint, you should refer to Paragraph 5 of the Rules of Procedure in determining how your response should be prepared. Any of the following circumstances, in particular but without limitation, if found by the Panel to be proved based on its evaluation of all evidence presented, shall demonstrate your rights or legitimate interests to the domain name for purposes of Paragraph 4(a)(ii):

  (i) before any notice to you of the dispute, your use of, or demonstrable preparations to use, the domain name or a name corresponding to the domain name in connection with a bona fide offering of goods or services; or

  (ii) you (as an individual, business, or other organization) have been commonly known by the domain name, even if you have acquired no trademark or service mark rights; or

  (iii) you are making a legitimate noncommercial or fair use of the domain name, without intent for commercial gain to misleadingly divert consumers or to tarnish the trademark or service mark at issue.

Based on Ali’s approaches to me, there was no intention for commercial gain, nor to tarnish the trademark or service mark at issue. I also have e-mail to prove his demonstrable preparations to use the domain in connection with a bona fide offering. Let me also add that my intention to blog for him was simply in my own support of the Google App Engine. I personally had nothing huge to gain from it other than possibly a little exposure from what could possibly be a good blog.

Let me also add that Trademark issue is a very different issue than the Copyright issue I mentioned before with the Mormon Church and Wikileaks. That issue was about Wikileaks knowingly stealing the content owned by the Mormon Church and using it for unintended purposes. This issue is simply about using the Google domain to further promote Google and its properties. Ali had intent to do such, and with my limited knowledge he should have every right to do so.

What if Facebook were to go after my other blog, FacebookAdvice, or even the book I co-wrote, “I’m on Facebook — Now What???“? What about my friend Nick O’Neill’s AllFacebook, or my other friend, Justin Smith’s InsideFacebook. What about my other blog, OpensocialNow? Does this mean I’m the next target to be bullied by Google?

Of course, GoogleAppsEngine.com isn’t my domain, and I don’t know what would make Ali feel better, but my suggestion to Google is to apologize to Ali for such a rude and inappropriate letter to what may be one of their biggest fans, and make right with him. How about, instead of threatening to take it away from him, offering him at least some swag and a little money for the domain? Come on Google - let’s not be evil here. I know you’re better than that.

As for Ali, last I heard he is not backing down. It’s a David vs. Goliath battle, but let’s hope Google can be a little better than Goliath in this case and just back down a little.

What do you think? Am I wrong on this issue? Is this just the same as the copyright issue I mentioned earlier? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts - this seems very unfair to me.

Photo courtesy http://mathmath-ecomm.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-is-useful-but-worried.html

So I noticed that one of the accepted proposals for the Mono project is to create a LINQ provider for SQLite. Major props to this (its something I totally want to see!) and I’m glad to see that LINQ in Mono is going to be its own beast, I love it when the FOSS community just takes a technology and runs with it! Anyways, I wanted to try and get in touch with the mentor/student of this project and share my experience (as the author of the current LINQ to SQLite component ). But contact info seemed hard to come by, so I thought I would post what I had learned.

First, people really want this, and there are several half-complete implementations floating around, including mine (read only, no commit/update/delete support) and this one.

Second, support for just queries is quite easy. Support for complete CRUD, tedious but not to difficult (lots of examples already exist). Support for the generation/mapping/reflection of a database to real Linq objects, this is the tricky part (specifically the UI elements when unable to just piggyback the Visual Studio work).

Anyways, all the luck in the world to this GSOC project, I would really like to see a working implementation come from this!

Yahoo’s keynote proved very interesting. In it they announced a new technology they call, Y! OS. This technology is to be the beginning of a new Open, Social Strategy for Yahoo, and with the technology, as they term it, they are “Re-wiring Yahoo”.

Starting today, Yahoo is opening up the beta for their Search Monkey platform, which is to be a new way to organize and format search results. He showed some interesting formatting of search results with reviews, descriptions, etc.

According to them, Yahoo’s open strategy is about opening up all the properties of Yahoo. First of such will be an Application platform. They will be socializing all of their properites, unifying the user profiles, and integrating the ability to add “applications” across all Yahoo properties and apply Social properties to those applications.

According to Yahoo, they are “Not creating ‘yet another social network’”. Yahoo does not view “Social” as a destination. It should be an integrated environment. He showed some examples of integration within the Yahoo mail environment, showing a way to pop up messages most relevant to the individual through the Social Graph. Taking Yahoo portable will also be an integral part of this.

Yahoo says that later this year the first version of Y! OS will be delivered. This will include the beginning of Social Graph and Application Development platform, and an entirely new dimension of developing applications at Yahoo will become available.

This is huge news for Yahoo - it puts them up at par with Google and Facebook, and will change the way you use the internet as you know it. Expect to see more from Google along these lines in the future - I believe the iGoogle OpenSocial integration predicts this. With Yahoo as a part of the OpenSocial foundation, I expect them to integrate OpenSocial as part of this, and move to a fully social strategy. I’m very excited for this announcement and look forward to Y! OS to come into play at the end of this year.

Mark Andreesen, creator of Mosaic and founder of Ning.com, spoke to us in an interview today at the Web 2.0 Expo, and shared with us some of his thoughts on the growing up of the web, and what he thinks of the future. As I mentioned earlier, one interesting thing he mentioned was plans for Facebook Platform Integration, something I am very excited for. Here are the highlights.

What were your expectations when you released Mosaic?: “Hype at the time was interactive TV. Mosaic and internet technologies were kind of the renegade of the time - no one believed it could make money.”

At what point did you think this was going to change the game?: “It wasn’t until after Netscape was started that Mark started thinking it was going to be a phenomenon.”

Many of the TV and media companies mentioned are now extremely important players in this space. What do you make of those guys now?: “By and large most of the major media companies are still unprepared for the shift. Many of the newspaper companies are in an absolute free-fall. There is still a story that has yet to be written. These companies are uneasy about a commodotized future. That said, things are still developing and are still unknown.”

In 1995 Microsoft realized what you were doing was competitive and decided to launch Internet Explorer for Free - what is your thought of that?: “Well, in fact they used my code. If you go into the credits you’ll see the name of Mosaic from University of Illinois in there.”

Looking at the legacy of the browser, what is it you like and what do you wish evolved differently?: “It has turned out far better than anyone ever thought. The big surprise has been how many of the ideas that we had that we thought were experiments have lasted. One example being javascript - we created something that looked like Java because it was familiar to people at the time. Another example was cookies - we were writing an E-Commerce site for MCI, and needed a way to do it, so created the “cookie thing”. People are now seeing that as a threat to privacy, and I find that amusing. The other expiriment was the back and forward buttons - we were looking for a better way to navigate the internet, and it’s interesting to see that that method has stuck around.”

You said, “It’s nice to have this kind of money for the ‘coming of the nuclear winter’”. Can you tell me how to “build our bunkers”?: “There’s a huge irony for the industry where after the crash of the stock market in 2001 all the money got put into Real Estate, and now that’s crashing. On one hand all of this is happening in a remote area and doesn’t have a lot to do with us, but on the other hand, it all comes back around, and effects us in the end.”

What are the advertising models that might work?: “Your company has a strong advertising model to it - Ning is a social network play, but different - why is it not Facebook?: Ning is a company for people to create their own social networks. On average those networks are growing very quickly. Adding 1500 networks a day, and people are discovering that social networking is a central part of their lives.”

How do you feel about the idea of Data Portability?: “In general, pro. You can import data in and out of Ning as you want. There is not a lot of consumer demand for that type of thing however. The majority of supporters of Data Portability are early adopters.”

Google has laid out OpenSocial and you have ascribed to it. What does that matter to the users of Ning?: “It matters by default. Facebook did an amazing thing with rolling out the idea of a Social Networking Platform that users can take applications and apply them to their profiles, a powerful idea. The Facebook platform was specific to Facebook though, so a standard was needed which we joined.”

“Facebook is starting to get more open about the Platform - directionally that is the trend. I think a lot of people like us will be implementing both OpenSocial and Facebook.”

I’m sitting here at Web 2.0 Expo and watching the Mark Andreesen Keynote. One interesting thing he mentioned was that Ning (and others) has plans to launch onto both OpenSocial and Facebook platforms. This is the first I have been aware of plans outside of Bebo to utilize the Facebook Platform, and I believe a wise decision. The Facebook Platform is indeed one of the most popular and most used platforms out there, and therefore worth looking into as a Social Network looking for a standard to adopt. The question is, is Ning in talks with Facebook on this, and how far along are they in organizing this? Is this pure speculation? I am very much looking forward to Ning, and other Social Networks adopting the Facebook Platform as a standard. I’ll be posting the notes from the keynote next.

Unfortunately I only have a Flip which gives me just 30 minutes of storage so you’ll be able to see the first 30 minutes below. I’m currently watching “Comparing Social Platforms”, with Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook, Allen Hurff, SVP Engineering for Myspace, Jessica Alter, Dir. of Platform and Business Development for Bebo, Patrick Chanezon, Google OpenSocial Evangelist, and David Recordon, Open Platform Lead for Six Apart. It’s fascinating to see the leaders of all 4 areas, including a developer standpoint from Six Apart all talking about ways to improve the Social Graph.

I’ll continue from where the video left off:

Allen Hurff said a great point when it comes to focus on Platform Development: “I love developers, but I love users ten times more”. That’s a great point and something we need to remember, and not be too demanding on as developers. In the end it’s all about the users of our applications.

Dave Morin talked about the Causes application. If the user can’t get the message to the friends that they care about such a cause, that’s bad and needs to be taken care of. Facebook is trying to focus on this, while finding balance with Applications that perhaps aren’t as impacting to ensure they aren’t being spammy and user experience is protected.

Patrick Chanezon says Google prefers the term “organic growth” to “viral growth”. Dave Morin brought up that ultimately, creating the best product is the end goal. Those applications that just focus on Viral growth grow fast, but ultimately die out. In the end you want the best experience for the user.

Dave Morin: “A lot of the times we’ll see viral but no ’social’”. Being able to see what your friends are doing with your application, how they interact together makes it social and not just viral.

Dave Morin: Social Commerce is the future of how people do business on the web. Working on a commerce engine for Facebook. He likes the applications that are doing virtual currencies (I agree).

David Recordon: Building applications has to be easy. Extensibility is important. It has to be easier than it is today - if more successful than today next year, technology still isn’t easy enough.

Questions:

• Matt from SocialThing: will there ever be a premium model with guaranteed uptime, extended support, etc.?: Myspace says they haven’t thought of it. Facebook says they are committed to their platform - says it’s a good point and also haven’t thought of it.
• How liberal are platforms going to be in sharing data?: Six Apart is one of the creators of the ATOM standard - bloggers should own their content. Facebook is committed to enabling people to take data where they want to. What exactly does “data portability” mean? Dave Morin posed that question to OpenSocial… “data portability” might not be the right word for it - “privacy portability” might be a better term for it. “It’s all about the user - it’s not about technology.”
• What are the thoughts on creating an even playing field for viral channels?: Myspace will have a hard time

In conclusion it looks like the theme for this was putting focus on the users in the end vision, not the application. I’ll upload the video in a minute if it isn’t showing yet.

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo starting tomorrow, April 22 through Friday, April 25. This, in my opinion, is one of the conferences to be at this year, as I really feel we’re getting to a tipping point towards the evolution of Social Networks. Expect to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0, Future of Mobile, and of course, the future of Social Networks. I’ll do my best to live-blog what I can on the Stay N’ Alive blog, OpensocialNow.com, and FacebookAdvice.com. I’ll be bringing along my wife’s Flip digital video camera so maybe I’ll even get some good video while I’m out there.

I’ll be bringing several signed copies (by both me and Jason) of “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” with me, which, if you’re a blogger and can convince me why I should give you a free copy (I love giveaways to your audience if you have a good audience) come see me. Or, if you already have a copy of the book I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there. I’ll be posting my whereabouts on Twitter so you should be able to find me. Also, look for me at the O’Reilly booth on Wednesday around 3pm. I’ll be also promoting my upcoming book, FBML Essentials and would love to meet you!

If you want to follow where I am, again, there’s Twitter, or feel free to check out my schedule here. Also, add me on Crowdvine!

So many articles have come out today about the new iGoogle integration with OpenSocial and launch of the developer’s sandbox for iGoogle. I don’t think any of their headlines truly do it justice. Google has just launched something so big that, to me, should keep Facebook and MySpace up at night. This, I believe, is the item Google had up their sleeves which my source mentioned earlier.

Let’s just start with the fact that anyone can join the sandbox! Google has not given any information on if information stored on the sandbox will be deleted when they go live, but indications are that this data will remain when the sandbox goes live. This sandbox seems different than the Orkut sandbox, in that the sandbox, and the live site are one integrated environment. If you sign up for the sandbox, when you go to http://www.google.com/ig it automatically takes you to the sandbox environment every time, and not the live environment. Are you an early adopter and want access to see your friends feeds and share your profile with them? Just sign up for the Sandbox here, add the developer tools tab (Note, tabs are gone - not sure what to call it now. Also, the link in the developer docs is wrong - use the one I just posted.), and now, under “Developer Tools” you will begin seeing all your friends, you can invite new friends, and see their status updates.

Here’s what the new iGoogle Sandbox is:

• Goodbye Tabs! — “Tabs” in iGoogle previously allowed you to segregate your Gadgets into different “views”, and Google even created pre-populated views such as “Finance” where they gave you all the Gadgets you needed for a particular subject. Google appears to have removed tabs in the sandbox, opting instead to put the “views” (or whatever Google will call them) into a sidebar on the left.

  

  I mentioned on Twitter earlier that the new vision Facebook is giving us for user Profiles has a striking resemblance to iGoogle’s tabbed interface. That is all Google is doing here - they are providing a true, open, customizable environment that they have already put years into in order to create the ultimate user profile for an individual. Now Google just needs a way to allow you to determine which of the “Views” will be visible by your friends - trust me, Google has way more up their sleeve on this one. Facebook has a lot to catch up in this. Frankly, Facebook’s best strategy may remain in the walled-garden approach.

  

• Friends from Google Reader and Gmail are now integrated in one, viral environment! — I have mentioned that Google Reader’s “Friends” integration was only the beginning for Google’s social efforts. I also argued that the API Google gives you to access Gmail Friend data is a big thing. Now, within a single environment, you can write applications that have access to these “Friends”, as well as all of your Gmail contact data. Ask it to suggest friend to you - you’ll notice it seems to be using that Gmail Contact API to retrieve your Gmail contacts and add them as friends.

  

  Now go into your Gmail contacts - how many people are on your contacts list? I’m willing to bet that for most people it’s way more than you have in Facebook or Myspace or LinkedIn. Imagine what will happen when that entire friends list begins adding each other as friends. This is why I think Google is building the largest Social Network ever. The great thing is Google’s platform is so vast you may not even know you’re in a “Social Network”. This is what Charlene Li was mentioning when she said Social Networks of the future will be transparent.

• Google Reader Profile is now easier to update and share with others — after you add the Developer Tools, you’ll notice your Google Reader Profile is now displayed and integrated for you. Where many people are using iGoogle as their Home Page of their browser, this now gives you a profile to edit, and share with others. Much of this data is available via the OpenSocial API and can be shared with others via Applications. Google is only beginning to give the user a sense of a “Profile” through this update - expect to see much more from them.

  

• “Updates” Feed/Gadget — under Developer Tools you’ll also see a “Status Updates” Gadget. This is a slap right in the “face” of Facebook’s News Feed in that now any interactions you make in Google Reader get stored in this Gadget, and shared on your Friends’ iGoogle pages. I believe this information will also eventually be available and updateable via the OpenSocial API.

  

• Status Updates — One cool thing I noticed is that when your “Updates” Gadget updates itself, it automatically updates a “Status” under your name in your profile. It doesn’t appear that it updates your Gmail status, but I expect that to happen in the future as well. I’d also love to see this updatable via the OpenSocial API and manually, as well.

  

• Automatic Invitations interface for your Apps — in the upper-right of each Gadget, there is a link to “Share this Gadget”. Click on that, and you can invite your friends to add the gadget as well. This is a great viral way to start, along with the Updates Feed, but I imagine we’ll also see ways to further get into the invitations architecture via OpenSocial in the future. For now, I suggest the Google Contacts API.
  

Now, imagine Google Apps getting this same functionality in the future and your business being allowed to have the same access to iGoogle Gadgets - Enterprise 2.0 is knocking at our doors, my friends! Google has just given us almost all the same functionality as Facebook, in an open, not walled garden. Google has just “Checked” Facebook here I believe.

Not Getting Things Done (click to enlarge)

There was a pretty big crowd at this morning's CTO Breakfast. Sam Curran had spent some time building an application on Google App Engine, so we had him demo his app and show us the code.

Overall, Google Apps looks like a very nice piece of infrastructure for building Web applications. The database integration with Big Table and Google's authentication platform add some good tools for quickly building applications.

We got into a pretty large discussion of the pros and cons of Google Apps, Amazon Web services, dedicated hosting, and so on. None of these services are directly competitive. They're complimentary in many respects. You could imagine many applications that would make use of all of them.

Speaking of Sam's application: a few days ago, I mentioned to Sam, Bryant and Devlin, that I liked putting things on lists because then I could get them out of my mind and if I lost the list, I never had to do them. A guilt-free way of not getting things done. The problem with online todo lists is they don't forget. I hate that! Sam picked up on that for his app and created a task list for people consumed with the guilt of unfinished tasks: Not Getting Things Done. Just put your tasks on the list and forget about them!

Tags: cto breakfast utah events web+services google python

This morning an e-mail went out to the OpenSocial and Gadget Spec Mailing List for OpenSocial developers, mentioning proposed problems and a need for “Templates” in OpenSocial. For those Facebook developers out there, this could be one of the missing links in OpenSocial, replacing the benefits of FBML for Facebook.

Read more about it on OpensocialNow!…

I’m going to take this one with a grain of salt. The last time they made an announcement like this it was recalled, and more than a month later until we actually saw a launch. However, today Orkut announced that they would be launching to 10% of their users, in a gradual rollout within “about” the next week. It looks as though they will be launching to millions of users in India at first, corresponding to 10% of their user base. Is the time really coming? Orkut - we really do want to see you succeed! Release early and release often man!

Read more at OpensocialNow.com…

I mentioned this at the Hackathon in March, but have not had the time to blog about it yet. Thus far all announcements for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meetings and Utah Facebook Developers Garage Meetings have been announced either through this blog, or our Facebook Group. I’ve now created a Google Group for us at http://groups.google.com/group/utsmdev. Please sign up there and I’ll issue all announcements via that list. Google Groups provides a more neutral ground in the sense that users don’t have to have an account to use it (to an extent), as compared to the Facebook groups. We’ll keep the Facebook groups around, and depending on membership I’ll still send announcements there as well, but I encourage all to sign up on the Google Group if possible. In addition, having a mailing list will allow us to have more of a discussion. This way if you are working on a project in Facebook, or OpenSocial, or even Wordpress or Twitter or other APIs and you run into issues, you can ask the group and we can work together to solve the problem. I figure this way we’ll be able to all build a strong Social Media Development community here in Utah that others can rely on. Google groups will also give us a page we can tell others about the group, when the next meeting is, etc. If you have some graphics and HTML skills to help with that I am open to volunteers!

Also, I have created a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/utsmdev/. For anyone okay with producing their code under the GPL, this will give you a place to store your code, and collaborate with others on the code, track issues, etc. If you want commit permissions to that repository please contact me and I’ll add you. As Google App Engine gets more integration into these things we’ll also set up a hosting option through Google App Engine to actually host your apps. Hopefully all these options will make it all much easier for everyone to get out and collaborate in their coding. It’s a good time to be a developer…

P.S. - We will continue on in our every-other-month meeting structure now, so our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in May. I’m working on a speaker, so if you know anyone or have ideas let me know!

The hype is out there and it is real. After the launch of Google Apps Engine, everyone is up in arms as to what exactly it is, and who needs to watch out. The truth is, everyone needs to watch out when Google launches something, since because of tight integration with all of their products, a slight tweak in one product could mean cross-integration between others, making it almost impossible for you to compete as a company because all of the sudden your space is being threatened by the new products.

Read more on OpenSocialNow.com…

I’d like to announce that SocialOptimize, my Social Media Development and Consulting and Apps Agency is being dissolved. I will now be assuming business under the name, “Stay N’ Alive Productions, LLC”. This, at least for now, will remain the main blog and website for my new business. What does this mean for my Social Efforts?

As you know, I have written 2 books, one on Facebook for Business and Personal Life (ranked #96 under “Job Hunting” on Amazon!) called, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???“, and another, published by O’Reilly, called “FBML Essentials” which focuses on Facebook Development from a software development perspective. (FBML Essentials should go to print around May) Recently I was featured by Guy Kawasaki on his blog, http://blog.guykawasaki.com - I encourage you to check out Stay N’ Alive, the blog, on http://socialmedia.alltop.com! I’m On Facebook–Now What??? has been listed (thanks to my co-author, Jason Alba) in the New York Times, US News and World Report, and I am receiving interview and speaking engagement requests on almost a weekly or more basis. I have consulted for some of the top 100 Facebook applications, including Paul Allen’s “We’re Related” Application (one of my favorites on Facebook!), and continue to get requests for consulting and development. That altogether takes up about 1/2 of my time - I have openings for April if you’re interested in an interview or speaker for your event!

In addition to my consulting, I would like to announce that I have teamed up with a development agency (more to be announced later) which will be able to provide development for those projects I consult on. If your company has development needs please contact me and I will introduce you to them and stay with you through the process.

For the second 1/2 of my time, I am building a network of communities on Facebook. I am working with several budding startup companies, along with a few apps I am building currently, to integrate into a large network of niche communities, all 100,000 users or less, perhaps a few with more, that cross-integrate and share features with each other. I will work with those in the network to provide consulting and development, at cost (and some less than cost depending on need and what we can work out), and in exchange you will get access to cross-promote, and gain access to many of the tools we will be providing, along with a great brand we will be building to promote the network. My goal is to make each application in our network as successful as possible according to your business needs. If you have an application you would like to include in my network, or need a way to build up your app further on a small budget, please contact me via the links on the right and we can discuss further how to best include you.

You’ll also see me doing several activities on a volunteer basis that I think will bring more of a focus to benefiting society through Social Media. Stay tuned for some of that, and in the meantime, visit Beth Kanter’s blog for a good resource.

So whether you’re looking to build up your small business under a budget, or need consulting, development, interviews, or speakers for your event, despite that I am no longer with SocialOptimize, I am still very much involved, and alive in the Social Media and Networking space. I am still “The Social Media Guru”. Give me a ring and let’s talk!

Okay, so I was wrong - it was worth a try. I do still expect more large announcements related to Social Media from Google. Just recently, Google announced their “Google Apps Engine” (will it be nicknamed, “GAE”?). It is essentially a competitor with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and SimpleDB, but at a much higher level. You’ll be required to interface with the service via the Python Programming language at first, but it is intended to make scalability and server set up much easier. Google does say that the underlying infrastructure is entirely language neutral, so we should expect more languages in the future. The advantage over Amazon is Google takes care of all the server set up for you - this is essential for a small business that can’t afford to hire an expensive Linux Admin as Amazon requires.

The Service is only available to the first 10,000 developers that apply at http://code.google.com/appengine/, and will be available starting at 9pm PST tonight. You can read more at Venturebeat and TechCrunch here and here.

According to Mike Arrington (I know, I said I wanted to boycott TechCrunch but it’s just so dang hard to avoid! I’ll stick to boycotting Crunchgear for now.), Google is having another “Campfire One” event tonight. The last Campfire One event they announced OpenSocial. It was the OpenSocial team that announced the event, and the biggest bloggers and developers in the industry were all there. Mike Arrington thinks this one is going to be the announcement of “BigTable”, Google’s answer to Amazon SimpleDB.

I think otherwise - see my thoughts at OpensocialNow.com.

I was perusing today, and maybe its just because its April Fools day and I’ve not posted, but I thought this was pretty hilarious…

If you click to add a new calendar item into Google Calendar, you get a new button “I’m Feeling Lucky”…

After clicking this new button I recognized, here’s what I got:

Woohoo!  So right before the Ubuntu/Fedora Release party on May 3, I have a date with Jessica Alba!  Nice!  I might blow off the release party if the date goes well…

I tried this a few more times and here’s the results I’ve received.  I’ve got dates with:

• Anna Kournikova on May 5 at 4pm
• Eric Cartman on May 10 at 6pm
• George W. Bush on May 6 at 4pm
• Matt Damon on May 8 at 8pm

Wow!  I’m popular.  Who else, what else did you get?

Cheers,

Herlo

For a while I've been trying to get a better way of managing my calendars on systems.  Between my iCal on my laptop, at home, my phone, and my google cals (gmail account, and apps for my domain),  I've gotten worse, rather than better at keeping things in sync.

My largest problem was that I didn't want any single location to be the absolute truth in terms of knowledge, especially when it came to choosing where to edit.  As an example, I dont' have to have to go to google calendar to edit, just because my iCal can only *read* from there, or vice-versa.  So enter GCALDaemon, a Java (I know) app which can run on linux, mac, and more and allow bi-directional work between my gcal, and ical, kontact, and more.  It works quite well, except the direction don't apply for the current Leopard release of OSX.  The main difference is in the location of where iCal stores its information, which is now in:

~/Library/Calendars/<Unique-id>.calendar/Events/*.ics

Which just happens to be the data you need for the config file, instead of the location they originally suggest.  Also of concern was that by default, my google apps calendar wouldnt' give me a "private" link, but I just had to munge the url of the public ics file with a s/public/private/ and it worked.  I now have my google calendars syncing bi-directionally with my laptop and desktop.

I haven't tried yet, but it also has a tool for getting an LDAP access to your google contacts, which will be nice.

Today Yahoo announced that they are joining forces with the OpenSocial platform, and will be joining both Google and MySpace to build “The OpenSocial Foundation”. This new foundation “will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity.” It is modeled after the current industry-supported OpenID foundation. As an addition to that announcement, Google has released “opensocial.org” to promote the development of OpenSocial on a standard platform away from the Google environment.

Read more about it over at OpensocialNow!

After meeting up with Bess Ho, founder of the Silicon Valley Web Builders and Facebook Developers Garage, we decided a joint hackathon, focusing on OpenSocial would be a great opportunity for both of our groups. So I’m proud to announce that next week, March 26, from 8pm MST to 1am MST the Utah Social Media Developers Group (formerly Utah Facebook Developers Garage) will be joining with the Silicon Valley Web Builders live via Ustream.tv and Qik for a great night of OpenSocial hacking!

We’ll kick off the event with a presentation by Jason McGowan, lead developer at the Facebook App, We’re Related. He’s going to talk about some of the work they’re doing on OpenSocial. We’ll follow that with a presentation by Ted Haeger, Director of Developer Relations at Bungee Labs. I’m told he’s going to show us some cool new features of the Bungee Labs developer tools that integrate with OpenSocial, in a 15 minute timeframe. Bungee Labs will be hosting the event and providing snacks and drinks. Here’s Ted’s Bio:

Ted Haeger directs Bungee Connect’s developer program and leads Bungee Labs’ team of evangelists. An avid technologist, Ted is keenly interested in the rapidly evolving social dynamics and changes to human culture coming about as the Internet continues to develop. Prior to his work at Bungee Labs, Ted directed the open source advocacy program for Novell. He still keeps strong ties to friends throughout Free Software community and regularly speaks at various international and regional open source events.

The rest of the night will be spent just hacking and coding on OpenSocial, with the help of other developers there in both Utah and Silicon Valley to help getting started and continuing your development in OpenSocial. Both Google and RockYou have generously offered to provide Swag for the event (MySpace was offered the opportunity, but supposedly they “have already met their goals for the number of developers on their platform”. MySpace - the offer is still out there if you want it!). Thanks to them for their generous help in getting this event together. So the evening should be full of education, swag, snacks, and coding, a developer’s dream! If you’re a business that would also like to offer some Swag or something else contact me and we’ll add your name to the Sponsors list!

So if you’re a developer already or looking to develop in Social applications in Google’s Open Source platform, OpenSocial, come on over and code with us! Those interested in meeting developers are also invited. Bungee Labs, Google, RockYou, and my Social Media Applications Agency, SocialOptimize, will be Sponsoring the event.

Before coming don’t forget to sign up for the sandboxes you are interested in developing on - they often take a few days to get approved. You can find links to those environments here. Be sure to check out the tutorial here.

An interesting Fact - based on comparing numbers with Bess in Silicon Valley, it appears that Utah has the largest group of Social Media developers next to Silicon Valley on the West Coast. Our Facebook Group actually has more than they do! Let’s all get together and show the developers in Silicon Valley what Utah is all about! Please be sure to RSVP for the event on Upcoming or Facebook (join our group there!). You can find directions to Bungee Labs here:

625 E Technology Ave B2300
Orem, UT 84097

I’m proud to announce a new website I’ve been working on.  You may have heard me Twitter about it a few times.  The site is called OpensocialNow!, and will be your source for OpenSocial News, Reviews, and info.  We’ll cover the Orkut launch, the Myspace launch, Hi5, and LinkedIn, as well as general things you can do with OpenSocial.  This is the first blog of its kind, and as OpenSocial launches in the next week or two I’m sure you’ll see many more like it.  It’s my hope that you’ll subscribe to the site via rss and make it your Official source for all things related to the popular social networking platform, OpenSocial.  You can read more about it right on the website here:

http://opensocialnow.com/2008/02/26/welcome-to-opensocialnow/

Oh, and stay tuned to OpensocialNow.com.  I have one more big announcement about a change in the OpenSocial launch coming up tonight!

A little birdie actually told this to me earlier, and I was going to blog about it tomorrow, but Orkut just confirmed it on their new developers blog.  Orkut is looking to officially launch OpenSocial to the Public in one week - Wednesday, February 27.

Orkut is looking to release the final version of OpenSocial as Release Candidate on the Orkut developer sandbox this Friday, February 22.  It will be released for developers to hammer away at for 3 days, and then will go back to Orkut for final QA and fixups.  February 27 it will officially go live for the entire public to start installing Apps!

One feature that will be missing is user to user messaging - this is a very big feature that is perhaps much of the reason Facebook has gotten as large as it has.  I am told in the first few weeks after launch that should go live.  I anticipate after this launch, the public will get curious about Orkut and you’ll see their membership go up substantially - with a tie-in to Google it is sure to bring many of the current fans of Google into it’s ranks with the news surrounding the launch.

My Social Media development and consulting company that I co-founded, SocialOptimize should have an app released on the 27th.  Keep an eye out for the “Know Your Neighbor” app when it launches!

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A little birdie actually told this to me earlier, and I was going to blog about it tomorrow, but Orkut just confirmed it on their new developers blog. Orkut is looking to officially launch OpenSocial to the Public in one week - Wednesday, February 27.

Orkut is looking to release the final version of OpenSocial as Release Candidate on the Orkut developer sandbox this Friday, February 22. It will be released for developers to hammer away at for 3 days, and then will go back to Orkut for final QA and fixups. February 27 it will officially go live for the entire public to start installing Apps!

One feature that will be missing is user to user messaging - this is a very big feature that is perhaps much of the reason Facebook has gotten as large as it has. I am told in the first few weeks after launch that should go live. I anticipate after this launch, the public will get curious about Orkut and you’ll see their membership go up substantially - with a tie-in to Google it is sure to bring many of the current fans of Google into it’s ranks with the news surrounding the launch.

My Social Media development and consulting company that I co-founded, SocialOptimize should have an app released on the 27th. Keep an eye out for the “Know Your Neighbor” app when it launches!

Gone are the days of the traditional website, and in are the days of the Rich Web Application. OpenSocial is introducing a new era of development on the web. All OpenSocial containers at the moment give you one page, and one only (with the exception of the profile, or other “surfaces”) to write your entire web application. All development is required to be client-side, with loaded javascript or Flash at the load of the web page, with occasional calls back to the server to load bits and pieces of data. This style of web development has had a long time coming, from the inception of AJAX and the ability to dynamically load just portions of a web page from an external web server.

As OpenSocial and the social web move forward, client and server development will move closer together and soon you will be developing more and more on just one “page”, similar to OpenSocial. From now on, web apps will begin to move towards the style of loading the entire application on the first load of the page, and only loading pieces of that application as data needs to change. Javascript and Flash will play larger roles in development because of this, and as technologies such as Adobe AIR take hold, more of that development will move away from a traditional browser environment and onto the desktop. More and more desktop and web development will move towards “widgets”, and further away from “websites”.

OpenSocial is the beginning - I predict Facebook will be forced to implement something similar to keep up with OpenSocial. Currently the Facebook API is completely server-based. There is a javascript API, but the ability to create a rich web application like OpenSocial, the javascript and Flash capabilities of Facebook are simply too limiting. In order for agencies like SocialOptimize, my Social Media development and consulting agency that I co-founded, to more efficiently write applications across multiple social networks, we’re going to have to standardize on one method of programming. With the openness of OpenSocial, and ability to develop containers on the server side, we will work more and more to write code that lets OpenSocial code run on Facebook itself. Facebook may not implement OpenSocial, but we, as developers may very well!

Is OpenSocial and the new method of “widget programming”, the death of the Facebook API? Definitely not - OpenSocial itself lacks a rich tagging system such as FBML provides (pre-order my book!). As these systems move forward Facebook, OpenSocial, and others will be forced more and more to standardize across platforms. We’re in a completely new era of web development - gone are the days of the traditional website!

The past 2 days I had the opportunity to join the Google OpenSocial developer team, along with other Silicon Valley and nationwide developers to celebrate the soon-to-be launched Orkut release to the public of OpenSocial apps at the Googleplex in San Francisco. The event started with an overview of OpenSocial, and went over some of the resources available to OpenSocial developers as well as a quick, “Hello World” example of an OpenSocial app on Orkut.Following that, it was up to the developers to code away, chat and meet with each other, ask the Google OpenSocial development team questions, and move forward, very fast on their apps. The goal was that by the end of the day, your OpenSocial application would be in a state, with the encouragement and approval of the OpenSocial team to be submitted to the Orkut directory. Those submitted yesterday would be available upon launch of the OpenSocial directory. (yesterday was the deadline for those to be included at launch, but you will continue to be able to submit throughout the launch)

While there, I was able to meet Adam Glickman, notorious for following perhaps the most people on Twitter, at 7000 (Adam, I should note that I have you beat in number of updates!). I also met, and chatted for a bit with Bess Ho, founder of the Silicon Valley Facebook Developers Garage, the Silicon Valley Web Builders, and a very strong evangelist and organizer of Social Media events in the Silicon Valley area. She was there developing her own app. We talked about collaborating further on some events between Silicon Valley and Utah in the future (stay tuned!).

The big buzz around the event was how one could better migrate a Facebook app to OpenSocial. One person pointed me to OpenSocket, which is intended to be code you can install on your Facebook app, essentially making it a container for OpenSocial code. So, in the future, ideally you would write your code in OpenSocial, and when you’re ready to port to Facebook you would simply place it on top of the OpenSocket container. I think you’ll see more things like this as OpenSocial launches. I’ll talk more on my opinions of why Facebook will need to implement OpenSocial in some capacity in a later post.

What I was most impressed with, is that with all those developing applications for OpenSocial, the theme for the hackathon was simplicity. Every single app demo’d that was going to launch on launch day was extremely simple, with plans to build on it further down the road. There were former Facebook developers, Google Gadget developers looking to make their gadgets more viral, as well as people completely new to developing for the social scene which demo’d their apps for the rest of us. I saw a drag and drop “Top Friends”-type app which will be called, ironically, “Facebook”. OpenSocial is really cool in that, because of Caja, you have much more flexibility with your Javascript than Facebook. Facebook (the site, not the app) should really look to implement Caja into their apps to keep security, while allowing flexibility within the app. Another group of guys from Idaho and Utah were developing a “date ideas” app. Some other guys were developing a really cool slide show app with some neat viral twists. It was also fun to see the mashup of different other Google APIs into the OpenSocial APIs. Each presenter got to take home a very cool OpenSocial T-shirt.

The event ended with a really great presentation from the project lead of the OpenSocial team - you might remember him as the Indian guy from the Campfire video at the OpenSocial launch. He showed User Experience and UI from a Google experience, with some really great tips on how to make your apps better. He suggested using the Orkut locality settings to set everything to a different language, and then seeing if you can navigate your app in a language you can’t understand. He also suggested breaking up your app - if it is 2 different ideas in one robust app, he suggested breaking it up into 2 different apps. He had some very interesting tips that I’ll try to incorporate into my own apps.

As for what I did? I wrote an app that allows you to track a group of people geographically close to you, send updates back and forth to that group, organize and collaborate, and find more people that are geographically close to you. I call it the, “Know Your Neighbor” app. I demo’d it at the end of yesterday, and got my cool T-Shirt to take home. Everyone had great response, so I have hopes it could be a hit. Then I submitted the app to the Orkut directory (ironically, Google uses the same “forms” system I talked about earlier for the app submission process. They are just collecting the app submission data in a Google spreadsheet somewhere), of which it will appear on the day of launch.

Look for the “Know Your Neighborhood” app on Orkut when it launches! As the other platforms launch I will be rolling it out to those platforms as well. SocialOptimize, my Social Media Development and Consulting Agency does OpenSocial development too - look us up if you would like some help building an OpenSocial strategy at your company!

Today I got to knock off another one of those “bucket list” items of things to do before I die.  Today I got to tour the Google campus as I attended the final Google OpenSocial Hackathon before it goes live at the end of this month.  I truly learned the creativity of Google as I attended this event.  It started, when I was asked to wait in the lobby for my escort into the Hackathon.  I was asked to “have one of the free juice bottles” over by the wall, and “have a seat in the massage chair”.  It was no ordinary massage chair either - it was a full body massage chair!

From that point on I felt like I was receiving the royal treatment.  Brad Feld would be proud of Google, as even their bathrooms make you feel as though you are receiving the royal treatment, from the heated toilet seats, to the bidet (no I didn’t use it - well, it was broken), to the literature on the walls to read and keep your mind “invigorated”.

As I was there, I had the privilege to meet with my cousin who works on the Google Caja (pronounced, “caha”, btw) team.  He took me to lunch in their gourmet cafeteria, where I had the best lunch I think I’ve ever had in my life, in a cafeteria lunch room!  All the food was prepared by professional chefs, and the cafeteria we attended was only one of the many cafeterias or restaurants they have around campus.  While there, we even got to see a Serge sighting - my cousin had to point him out to me, as he just looked like any of the other engineers there, t-shirt, jeans, messy hair.  Evidently, with as large as Google is this was only the second or third time my cousin had seen Serge Brinn there.

All scattered throughout the Google campus are things just like this.  There are scooters as well as Segways provided throughout campus for employees to get around quickly.  I’ve never seen so many Prius’s in my life, as Google evidently gives a $5,000 credit if you buy one.  Near ever door were bike racks, filled to the brim with bikes, something I haven’t even seen in Utah where things are usually fairly close together.

All around campus there were “mini-bars”, stocked full with drinks, cereal, snacks, food, and whatever you might need to munch on as you work hard for the company.  My wife keeps asking me why I don’t work for Google.  I don’t think she really wants me to though, because if I did, I don’t think I’d ever come home!

With such royal treatment from Google, as even just a visitor they got my attention.  While I run my own business, if I were any of the other developers attending that OpenSocial hackathon I would definitely be thinking how I could get a job at Google.  Google brands itself even down to its headquarters as a place for Engineers, and a place you could live your life around.

While there I met some really great people - I’ll talk more about that, and the hackathon tomorrow as I finish up the hackathon.  Let’s just say Facebook has got some serious competition to contend with now.  Let’s just hope, with the support they have from the developer community, that they can keep up.

Did you know Amazon has a Social Network?  In fact, it’s pretty robust!  In Amazon, if you click “(your name)’s Amazon”, then “Your Profile”, you have the option to set up a profile, including a biography, information about yourself, and get this - a list of all your friends currently on Amazon.com. It can show your recent purchases, your favorite items, your wish list, and more. It even gives you a blog in which you can send messages to those that are friends with you. You can also import your own blog’s rss into the blog feed. Amazon has even MySpace beat, with an activity feed of recent activity by your friends.

The real power comes for authors. As an author, I can have people add me as a friend, and I can keep an open dialog with my readers. I can introduce deals, notify when new editions of the book are released, and more. You can see my favorite books, movies, and music, my wishlist, and my biography. You can also see the other books I have written. Amazon also lets you verify through a publisher or agent that a book was written by you, so your books on Amazon can link back to your profile.

Amazon has quite a tool here that I wouldn’t put past them building on in the future. If you think the MySpace OpenSocial announcement was big, imagine if Amazon were to embrace an API such as OpenSocial. In the USA alone, Amazon has over 60 million members in its network. Each one of those members is tied to a bank account of some sort and has probably bought something at some point from the site. Add to that the existing APIs Amazon provides, allowing users to query the Amazon database, associate affiliate IDs and sell items based on commission, Amazon could have the first proven revenue model for a Social Network.

Amazon and Google aren’t the best of friends. Would Amazon embrace Google’s OpenSocial, or create their own as they have through Amazon AWS? Visit my Profile and add me as a friend on Amazon!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NYWKPQAI1F5R

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Yesterday Google announced a rather interesting, and I believe strategic move, allowing users of Google Docs to put forms in front of their online spreadsheets through Google Docs.  I didn’t realize this until now, but Google really has a dynamic, unflattened data source that they have been providing through their Google Spreadsheets.  Now, with the ability to add forms, in many ways we are seeing another hosted development platform for website owners to use for whatever they would like to collect data for.  This has been long needed - I can’t tell you how many people have asked me at some time to install Formmail.pl for them to send them e-mails of a simple form they have installed on their website.  Now, they can just set up a Google doc, and a form to front that doc, and no e-mail is necessary!

The functionality is very simple right now, but one has to remember this is Google, which at one point was just a simple search engine.  Google always starts simple, and takes over the world with that simple plan.  Imagine if Google were to incorporate their new graphing API into these forms for simple survey-taking capabilities.  Now, add to that the ability for more robust reporting beyond that, ability to include single cells from a spreadsheet, and perhaps a query language of sorts to interface with it.  Google could very soon be competing with perhaps at first the likes of Amazon S3 storage services, but even more, their SimpleDB query engine, at a much more robust level.  This is Google after all.  I wouldn’t put it past them.

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It appears I spoke too soon.  About 5 minutes ago Google announced Orkut will launch their applications to all users the last week in February.  I was close - an announcement was made, and they will be launching OpenSocial 0.7 tomorrow, the same day MySpace opens to developers.  In essence, OpenSocial is going live tomorrow.  It just won’t be visible to the public until the last week in February.  It appears, as I said, Google had to have the last word.

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As I mentioned earlier, I think the MySpace launch is way bigger than just MySpace.  Watch carefully tomorrow.  There have been several announcements at Google that hint that you may just see Orkut go live tomorrow as well.  From the Release Notes for the latest version of OpenSocial (0.7), under Orkut container update:

 ”Close for gadget whitelist submission Feb 5″

I’m not quite sure what this fully means, other than it looks like things are finishing up for Orkut tomorrow.  Also, today Google released a blog post, of which they stated:

The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.

On the mailing list today (just 6 hours ago), an Orkut developer stated:

We haven’t pushed v0.7 yet, but we’re planning to do it soon.  In the
meantime, use feature=”opensocial-0.6″ and I’ll post when v0.7 is
live.

It’s looking like 0.7 is soon to go live “soon”, and will more than likely with it, make it very possible for sites like Orkut who have been in testing for so long to go live with it (rather than just a developer sandbox like it has now).  MySpace itself will release in a sandbox for about a month on it (I just got word MySpace has officially launched to developers).  Is Orkut getting ready to do a one-up on MySpace tomorrow?

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Gone are the days of the traditional website, and in are the days of the Rich Web Application.  OpenSocial is introducing a new era of development on the web.  All OpenSocial containers at the moment give you one page, and one only (with the exception of the profile, or other “surfaces”) to write your entire web application.  All development is required to be client-side, with loaded javascript or Flash at the load of the web page, with occasional calls back to the server to load bits and pieces of data.  This style of web development has had a long time coming, from the inception of AJAX and the ability to dynamically load just portions of a web page from an external web server.

As OpenSocial and the social web move forward, client and server development will move closer together and soon you will be developing more and more on just one “page”, similar to OpenSocial.  From now on, web apps will begin to move towards the style of loading the entire application on the first load of the page, and only loading pieces of that application as data needs to change.  Javascript and Flash will play larger roles in development because of this, and as technologies such as Adobe AIR take hold, more of that development will move away from a traditional browser environment and onto the desktop.  More and more desktop and web development will move towards “widgets”, and further away from “websites”.

OpenSocial is the beginning - I predict Facebook will be forced to implement something similar to keep up with OpenSocial.  Currently the Facebook API is completely server-based.  There is a javascript API, but the ability to create a rich web application like OpenSocial, the javascript and Flash capabilities of Facebook are simply too limiting.  In order for agencies like SocialOptimize, my Social Media development and consulting agency that I co-founded, to more efficiently write applications across multiple social networks, we’re going to have to standardize on one method of programming.  With the openness of OpenSocial, and ability to develop containers on the server side, we will work more and more to write code that lets OpenSocial code run on Facebook itself.  Facebook may not implement OpenSocial, but we, as developers may very well!

Is OpenSocial and the new method of “widget programming”, the death of the Facebook API?  Definitely not - OpenSocial itself lacks a rich tagging system such as FBML provides (pre-order my book!).  As these systems move forward Facebook, OpenSocial, and others will be forced more and more to standardize across platforms.  We’re in a completely new era of web development - gone are the days of the traditional website!

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The past 2 days I had the opportunity to join the Google OpenSocial developer team, along with other Silicon Valley and nationwide developers to celebrate the soon-to-be launched Orkut release to the public of OpenSocial apps at the Googleplex in San Francisco. The event started with an overview of OpenSocial, and went over some of the resources available to OpenSocial developers as well as a quick, “Hello World” example of an OpenSocial app on Orkut.Following that, it was up to the developers to code away, chat and meet with each other, ask the Google OpenSocial development team questions, and move forward, very fast on their apps. The goal was that by the end of the day, your OpenSocial application would be in a state, with the encouragement and approval of the OpenSocial team to be submitted to the Orkut directory. Those submitted yesterday would be available upon launch of the OpenSocial directory. (yesterday was the deadline for those to be included at launch, but you will continue to be able to submit throughout the launch)

While there, I was able to meet Adam Glickman, notorious for following perhaps the most people on Twitter, at 7000 (Adam, I should note that I have you beat in number of updates!). I also met, and chatted for a bit with Bess Ho, founder of the Silicon Valley Facebook Developers Garage, the Silicon Valley Web Builders, and a very strong evangelist and organizer of Social Media events in the Silicon Valley area. She was there developing her own app. We talked about collaborating further on some events between Silicon Valley and Utah in the future (stay tuned!).

The big buzz around the event was how one could better migrate a Facebook app to OpenSocial. One person pointed me to OpenSocket, which is intended to be code you can install on your Facebook app, essentially making it a container for OpenSocial code. So, in the future, ideally you would write your code in OpenSocial, and when you’re ready to port to Facebook you would simply place it on top of the OpenSocket container. I think you’ll see more things like this as OpenSocial launches. I’ll talk more on my opinions of why Facebook will need to implement OpenSocial in some capacity in a later post.

What I was most impressed with, is that with all those developing applications for OpenSocial, the theme for the hackathon was simplicity. Every single app demo’d that was going to launch on launch day was extremely simple, with plans to build on it further down the road. There were former Facebook developers, Google Gadget developers looking to make their gadgets more viral, as well as people completely new to developing for the social scene which demo’d their apps for the rest of us. I saw a drag and drop “Top Friends”-type app which will be called, ironically, “Facebook”. OpenSocial is really cool in that, because of Caja, you have much more flexibility with your Javascript than Facebook. Facebook (the site, not the app) should really look to implement Caja into their apps to keep security, while allowing flexibility within the app. Another group of guys from Idaho and Utah were developing a “date ideas” app. Some other guys were developing a really cool slide show app with some neat viral twists. It was also fun to see the mashup of different other Google APIs into the OpenSocial APIs. Each presenter got to take home a very cool OpenSocial T-shirt.

The event ended with a really great presentation from the project lead of the OpenSocial team - you might remember him as the Indian guy from the Campfire video at the OpenSocial launch. He showed User Experience and UI from a Google experience, with some really great tips on how to make your apps better. He suggested using the Orkut locality settings to set everything to a different language, and then seeing if you can navigate your app in a language you can’t understand. He also suggested breaking up your app - if it is 2 different ideas in one robust app, he suggested breaking it up into 2 different apps. He had some very interesting tips that I’ll try to incorporate into my own apps.

As for what I did? I wrote an app that allows you to track a group of people geographically close to you, send updates back and forth to that group, organize and collaborate, and find more people that are geographically close to you. I call it the, “Know Your Neighbor” app. I demo’d it at the end of yesterday, and got my cool T-Shirt to take home. Everyone had great response, so I have hopes it could be a hit. Then I submitted the app to the Orkut directory (ironically, Google uses the same “forms” system I talked about earlier for the app submission process. They are just collecting the app submission data in a Google spreadsheet somewhere), of which it will appear on the day of launch.

Look for the “Know Your Neighborhood” app on Orkut when it launches! As the other platforms launch I will be rolling it out to those platforms as well. SocialOptimize, my Social Media Development and Consulting Agency does OpenSocial development too - look us up if you would like some help building an OpenSocial strategy at your company!

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Today I got to knock off another one of those “bucket list” items of things to do before I die.  Today I got to tour the Google campus as I attended the final Google OpenSocial Hackathon before it goes live at the end of this month.  I truly learned the creativity of Google as I attended this event.  It started, when I was asked to wait in the lobby for my escort into the Hackathon.  I was asked to “have one of the free juice bottles” over by the wall, and “have a seat in the massage chair”.  It was no ordinary massage chair either - it was a full body massage chair!

From that point on I felt like I was receiving the royal treatment.  Brad Feld would be proud of Google, as even their bathrooms make you feel as though you are receiving the royal treatment, from the heated toilet seats, to the bidet (no I didn’t use it - well, it was broken), to the literature on the walls to read and keep your mind “invigorated”.

As I was there, I had the privilege to meet with my cousin who works on the Google Caja (pronounced, “caha”, btw) team.  He took me to lunch in their gourmet cafeteria, where I had the best lunch I think I’ve ever had in my life, in a cafeteria lunch room!  All the food was prepared by professional chefs, and the cafeteria we attended was only one of the many cafeterias or restaurants they have around campus.  While there, we even got to see a Serge sighting - my cousin had to point him out to me, as he just looked like any of the other engineers there, t-shirt, jeans, messy hair.  Evidently, with as large as Google is this was only the second or third time my cousin had seen Serge Brinn there.

All scattered throughout the Google campus are things just like this.  There are scooters as well as Segways provided throughout campus for employees to get around quickly.  I’ve never seen so many Prius’s in my life, as Google evidently gives a $5,000 credit if you buy one.  Near ever door were bike racks, filled to the brim with bikes, something I haven’t even seen in Utah where things are usually fairly close together.

All around campus there were “mini-bars”, stocked full with drinks, cereal, snacks, food, and whatever you might need to munch on as you work hard for the company.  My wife keeps asking me why I don’t work for Google.  I don’t think she really wants me to though, because if I did, I don’t think I’d ever come home!

With such royal treatment from Google, as even just a visitor they got my attention.  While I run my own business, if I were any of the other developers attending that OpenSocial hackathon I would definitely be thinking how I could get a job at Google.  Google brands itself even down to its headquarters as a place for Engineers, and a place you could live your life around.

While there I met some really great people - I’ll talk more about that, and the hackathon tomorrow as I finish up the hackathon.  Let’s just say Facebook has got some serious competition to contend with now.  Let’s just hope, with the support they have from the developer community, that they can keep up.

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I just found this on google’s blog.  Its a new blog that is dedicated to sharing about open source happenings at Google.

Did you know Amazon has a Social Network?  In fact, it’s pretty robust!  In Amazon, if you click “(your name)’s Amazon”, then “Your Profile”, you have the option to set up a profile, including a biography, information about yourself, and get this - a list of all your friends currently on Amazon.com. It can show your recent purchases, your favorite items, your wish list, and more. It even gives you a blog in which you can send messages to those that are friends with you. You can also import your own blog’s rss into the blog feed. Amazon has even MySpace beat, with an activity feed of recent activity by your friends.

The real power comes for authors. As an author, I can have people add me as a friend, and I can keep an open dialog with my readers. I can introduce deals, notify when new editions of the book are released, and more. You can see my favorite books, movies, and music, my wishlist, and my biography. You can also see the other books I have written. Amazon also lets you verify through a publisher or agent that a book was written by you, so your books on Amazon can link back to your profile.

Amazon has quite a tool here that I wouldn’t put past them building on in the future. If you think the MySpace OpenSocial announcement was big, imagine if Amazon were to embrace an API such as OpenSocial. In the USA alone, Amazon has over 60 million members in its network. Each one of those members is tied to a bank account of some sort and has probably bought something at some point from the site. Add to that the existing APIs Amazon provides, allowing users to query the Amazon database, associate affiliate IDs and sell items based on commission, Amazon could have the first proven revenue model for a Social Network.

Amazon and Google aren’t the best of friends. Would Amazon embrace Google’s OpenSocial, or create their own as they have through Amazon AWS? Visit my Profile and add me as a friend on Amazon!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NYWKPQAI1F5R

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Yesterday Google announced a rather interesting, and I believe strategic move, allowing users of Google Docs to put forms in front of their online spreadsheets through Google Docs.  I didn’t realize this until now, but Google really has a dynamic, unflattened data source that they have been providing through their Google Spreadsheets.  Now, with the ability to add forms, in many ways we are seeing another hosted development platform for website owners to use for whatever they would like to collect data for.  This has been long needed - I can’t tell you how many people have asked me at some time to install Formmail.pl for them to send them e-mails of a simple form they have installed on their website.  Now, they can just set up a Google doc, and a form to front that doc, and no e-mail is necessary!

The functionality is very simple right now, but one has to remember this is Google, which at one point was just a simple search engine.  Google always starts simple, and takes over the world with that simple plan.  Imagine if Google were to incorporate their new graphing API into these forms for simple survey-taking capabilities.  Now, add to that the ability for more robust reporting beyond that, ability to include single cells from a spreadsheet, and perhaps a query language of sorts to interface with it.  Google could very soon be competing with perhaps at first the likes of Amazon S3 storage services, but even more, their SimpleDB query engine, at a much more robust level.  This is Google after all.  I wouldn’t put it past them.

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