Dudu Mimran Blog

Thoughts on application development and setup in windows vs. linux

After many long years of development to both MS Windows platforms and Linux platforms and especially lots of frustration in recent days trying to install/uninstall software on my WinXP to solve a problem I have few conclusions on propietary vs. open source development.

One of the nice things about development in Microsoft world (or at least seems so until you get into trouble) is that everything wraps up so nicely as if you were in a candy store. There are very nice tools for development and there sophisticated mechanisms for code reuse such as DLLs and libraries as well as well documented APIs and examples. Microsoft as a sole owner of the MS Windows platform has created a complete eco-system of dev tools to enable you as a developer to rapidly develop your own applications. One simple MS-Windows application usually relies on many, many dependencies such as other products installed/service packs/specific operating systems/DLLs and actually when you wrap your application as a setup package you usually rely on these to exist in the target computer and to be (hopefully) compliant with your specific application requirements. To package all dependencies into your application is not relevant and some do package unique extensions that are required but most just deliver their own app relying on Microsoft to handle dependencies.

This mechanism works very nice in a controlled environment world where you fully control the setup of your test machines but once you go into the wild where the variatey of combinations of configurations are enourmous, things usually break. Especially after few install/uninstalls of few apps where each one leaves its trails of broken dependencies. Actually as I see it a MS-Windows PC that has received a normal "dosage" of installs/uninstalls becomes actually cautic in terms of what is actually residing in it. Here the lack of awareness to what your application actually needs and depends on works to your worst.

On Linux/Open Source world when you develop you usually know what you are depending on and the approach is more minimalistic in terms of depending on too many components to already reside on the target computer unless it is a specific runtime platform like perl or python. This approach makes your dev/packaging process seem at first more "dirty" and requires hands-on experience but the end result is a way more stable deployment then what you could achieve in MS World. Usually install/uninstall of software on Linux does not affect the rest of the system and the instructions on how to make your software work can become very clear. This is attributed to the way Linux and open source in general has been developed by different indpendent minds who found an effective integration approach unlike MS "integrative" one.

I am not sure whether it is MS goal to achieve perfect automatic/transparent platform but still eventually the more hand-on approach seem to work better. This opens up some thoughts on APP store like approaches for iPhone for example where there a similar simplistic approach to handle deployment automatically is being taken. Currently in the App store frontier with the low amount of software packages and low complexity of available apps nowadays the problem does not seem to exist but still time will tell how it will deal with complexity similar to MS variety.

That is also why people like web apps a lot where no "apparent" setup happens though this environment goes also through changes that make it "stickier" to te target playform such as Google Gears and native code implementations.  Actually within browsers the setup happens on demand and new code deployment happens automatically where dependencies are minor since the browser seperates automatically dependencies between domains.

RSS based ranking or maybe a new protocol is needed?

RSS is a protocol for transmitting changes within blogs that has been widely adopted and provides a solution for a big problem people had in tracking changes in content effectively. RSS is doing a perfect job in providing updates to content based on time of change but still lacks support for providing other criteria for ordering changes.

At first RSS has been used solely for providing list of recent changes whether for blogs or other content management systems such as wikis. Now it seems that RSS is used more broadly to provide access to recent list of data items that are different one from another not only by time of change but also by order of importance for example.

If we take Techmeme for example, they provide actually and ordered list of stories (blog posts or news) where the order is based on importance. Consuming Techmeme via RSS does not unveil the full picture of importance within Techmeme since date of publication is the only criteria RSS readers know to consider during display. Together with Techmeme we can put any search engine results delivered via RSS, bids for an auction and more..

Does anyone have an idea for a protocol or maybe some trick to reuse RSS while maintaining true order of items during presentation?

The King is Back

Hi All,

I am very happy to announce that King Ping is up and running again. This time under new ownership of Rodney Trotter, the person who acquired King Ping site assets.

Working out the sale of King Ping to Rodney was a great pleasure and I found him an excellent and reliable  business man to work with.

To all of you who have missed King Ping, check it out again on King Ping and for Rodney I wish the best of luck!

Dudu

Google knocks out Microsoft silently

Today goog announced the release of a research technology called Native Code which is just another step in making the browser the real operating system. Native Code enables web developers (if you can keep calling them this way after this release at all) to develop code that will run native on the user's pc as if it was an installed application where all the computer resources are available.

Microsoft, who lost the browser battle (just recently Steve Ballmer announced that they will consider the open source webkit as a rendering engine for IE, hence death for the proprietary IE), will find out pretty soon that the browser can provide developers no less development platform then Microsoft Windows. With this native code and Google Chrome process architecture basically you can develop everything. You just don't need to install it and even more then that, you don't need to buy MS Windows in order to enjoy it since it is cross platform by nature.

The future where browsers will be actually the only software to be installed on the device you own looks very interesting: Delivery of all software will be changed profoundly were not only the web applications we know today will be easilly accessible but actually every functionality you desire will be there. It sounds to be similar to the way app stores/marketplaces work today with one big boost!

I saw also last week a post on Techmeme saying that Google might have a secret OS and I personally don't think they do it secretly, they actually do it very open and with pride, they just do it step by step without coming out with big declarations.

Microsoft Ballmer dismisses Android

I found today a news on Cnet titled Ballmer dismisses Google Android where the content of the news item is clearly described in its title. This kind of titles always attract to read further since usually when Microsoft dismisses something, I believe that something has a great future. It is amazing that Microsoft's CEO still holds the same position of disregarding things he does not understand (and his own words - "I don't really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does."). As far as I remember the last time he did not understand what Google does with search, that was the day he lost the battle on the search field.

Later on there is also another "funny" quote of him in regards to Google and here it is - "If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, 'hey, we've just launched a new product that has no revenue model!'...I'm not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that's kind of what Google's telling their investors about Android," - again, if he would raise his head, he would that most of the things google does are free so why does he think their shareholders would be surprised or non supportive. he might be reflecting his own shareholders attitude where they are use to revenue based product and that is actually where they fall short.

As for Android (although my case above relates to anything Microsoft dismisses in vanity)  did he maybe think, it can be their alternative OS for MS Windows with one difference - free. I know it is for mobile devices right now and a bit limited, but well, all devices are becoming mobile and given enough time it will have a laptop version as well.

Dudu

Free online feedback service - Kampyle

I got to know Kampyle through some personal relationship and it seems like a great service that is much needed by many web sites/services. They do several things but the basic web feedback service is nicely crafted. I used to work in the past with OpinionLabs, which always seemed to me a bit outdated in terms of design and service and now Kampyle provides a much better alternative.

Dudu

P.S. I am not sure about the origin of the name Kampyle, which is a bit odd, especially for an Israeli startup. After some thinking I came up with the suggestion that it is a name based on the word "compile" but expresses the way it is spelled by Israelis with heavy russian accent. Maybe:)

Turning a page

After a long and deep contemplation on my current internet activities, Aggreg, Strategicboard, King Ping and Trendmapper I decided to shut it off. I really could not find how can I monetize this sites and after long three years of hard work and devotion I decided to turn the page.

Apologies to the users  of these services although not too many still there are few who were loyal during all the bad and good times and I thank you for this.

Anyway, it is the time for something new...

Cheers,

Dudu

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the warm feelings. Of course I will be around and will soon talk about the new thing I am working on.

UPDATE: King Ping is alive again thanks to Rodney Trotter, the new owner. Check it out and all the best to Rodney!

What does Google Browser means to me?

Google having their own browser is a move I did not anticipate and is actually a brilliant idea in terms of os replacement for other proprietary operating systems, hence microsoft. I think it will actually be very successfull for two reasons:

- being open source

- being powered by a web state of mind (and no one is such as google is)

The fact it is open source I think means a killer for IE since having one propietary browser and one open source (mozilla) is one thing. Having two major players with open source browser and one propietary means the propietary is bad.

As for myself, I think it means a big change in terms of web based application and their bright future to become the dominant development platform for new products and services. I find it hard to rationalize now developing platform specific applications while the ability to cross platform them is so easy.

Anyway, I am very glad on this. As for chrome, I played with that a bit this morning and after a while it stuck my laptop but I guess this is only early stage problems.

Dudu

Long time no blog

Well, I am finaly able to admit that blogging isn't easy as I thought it was when I started this blog. I had dreams of blogging everyday, once upon every interesting thing that happens and apparently I did not. Tried to blame it on lack of time, subjects I did not think were worthy or plain secrecy to hide my grand plans on what I do but these are all just plain and lame excuses. I actually miss blogging, though I was much more active when I did not run Aggreg's activities.

Anyway, after not blogging for a while I understood that blogging is not actually being done for the sake of other people, and that it mainly serves me. This online form of expressing thoughts and ideas has mind refreshing effects even if no one reads them. Then why would not I write a personal diary, well, it is just not the same.

Getting back to blogging, well I am currently in some kind of a crossroad where I contemplate on further investing (and salvaging all "sunk cost"(:) on Aggreg's activities which are highly related to blog indexing and search (strategicboard, king ping) or maybe do something else.

Strategicboard, which has started in my mind as an enterprise competitive analytics tool has evolved quite fast into a small blog search engine, which has been home grown to track and index 2 Million blogs. To Aggreg's activities I have added King Ping, a central blog pinging service and TrendMapper, a search engine trending service. To be honest none of these really took off for many reasons I understand and probably many more I don't.

My general plan for 2008 was to revamp the backend of Aggreg to deal with the whole blogosphere 200M+- blogs and although the plan and infrastructure challenges are solved theoritecally, still I find it hard to really pursue the plans without clear understanding of my direction.

Let's say I already did the upgrade and I have now a nice blog search engine with full coverage on the blogosphere and with all the must have's such as topic classification, spam filtering and other goodies. What can I really do with it that other did not?

Technorati  has these capabilities I am talking about for a long time now and although there are many complaints on the net that they lack cool and effective features that are driven by past existing passion, still I can not pretend to think that I can do a better job. I can find many fault with what they do but I also highly appreciate their position and challenge.

Tailrank being developed by highly admired (I admire him) Kevin Burton has reduced focus from the public blog search engine into an outsourced blogosphere crawler/indexer to be used by other vendors or enterprises (Spinn3r).  Spinn3r is wrapped really nicely for big clients but still I personally do not believe too much in this kind of market and the reduction of focus on Tailrank says to me Kevin does not believe too much in the public service called blog search engine too much either.

Twingly, a new sweden company with the highlight of being spam less blog search engine. I tried it several times but could not get the feeling this was the killer feature blog search engines miss of all. Again, the product is wrapped really nice (much better job then I did:) but still I am not sure users are flooding to their service.

Google Blogsearch, this is the weirdest of all services and is ranked the lowest in the list of blog search engines I appreciate. Although being powered by the dreamy infrastructure Google can provide to web apps and has basically the widest coverage and highest refresh rate on content of all other competitors, still it is just lack of a charecter. Intrnet users can access blogs via their regular search engine (and I guess most of them do without even being aware to the fact they visit blogs) and it seems that instead of adding a small checkbox in the regular search engine to filter results from blog they create some simple user interface. It seems to me no one in Google takes a second glance at their results in the blog search engine and they created it as a funny counter move to the so called industry of blog search engines in their eyes. It is a bit of an insult to people who are really interested to blogs.

Of course there are any others, small and big where aggregators also come into the pictures (where is the boundary between an aggregator and a blog search engine lie?) and these are just several examples I see from the industry.

Getting back to my humble efforts, I can not say seriously that I have found the one/two features that others miss, where I can fix it and become the head of the pack. I am not sure whether it is even a real pack?

To list some of the aspects that are good and bad within specific companies we can see:

• Topic classification whether structural or semi structural


• Spam filtering


• Real blog ranking except for simply counting incoming links or running an artificial pagerank on this portion of the web


• Rich blogger tools


• On demand service such as watchlists, I saw many complaint on Technorati's weakness in this area but still we have pubsub and Google Alerts to remember


• Really fresh content


• Many widgets?


• Rich media


• ....


• Maybe all?

I guess that is all in terms of my thoughts on the area and I have to say I really love and believe in blogs as a medium that will evolve and I still try to find my way into it.

Changes in Aggreg

Hi All,

We are currently re-architecturing Aggreg infrastructure to address the increasing blogosphere. The site will be down for the whole duration of Augost and we expect to relaunch Strategicboard again on beginning of september. The changes we take include distributed processing and aggregation of content aiming to increase our coverage from 1M blogs to 100M and more. We will still maintain the simplicity of Strategicboard blog search while providing better results.

Thanks for your patience,

Dudu