Share this:

Dimitri Glazkov

If you build Web sites, you probably use Javascript libraries. If so, you are probably grateful to the nameless heroes whomaketheselibrariesnot suck.

One common problem these brave soldiers of the Web have to face is encapsulation. You know, one of them turtles on which the Object-Oriented Programming foundation sits, upon which stands most of the modern software engineering. How do you create that boundary between the code that you wrote and the code that will consume it?

With the exception of SVG (more on that later), today’s Web platform offers only one built-in mechanism to isolate one chunk of code from another — and it ain’t pretty. Yup, I am talking about iframes. For most encapsulation needs, frames are too heavy and restrictive.

What do you mean I must put each of my custom buttons in a separate iframe? What kind of insane…

View original post 1,314 more words

Alive and Kickin’

Hello people…

Just feeling a need to reactivate my old blogs…

I went to several tools, including my old Blogger blog but I found the tools either too simple or too complex to handle a Blog.

Under my general conception ( since I’m effectively online since 1996 every single day of my existance ), a Blog should be a simple, practical and fast content publishing tool to handle.

Since the mobile buzz (which dates back to 2005 at least for me), those publishing capabilities should be extended to mobile devices too, and yet, on those tiny microcomputers which we gently call phones on those days, the flexibility, agility and practicity of those so called “blog-engines” should be nothing less than smooth and fast.

Well, sorry for the prolixity (a.k.a. Verbosity), but as I’m posting from my iPhone now to test WordPress app, I need to write this little gospel here to “feel” the app.

I have choosed Worpress for it’s core technology (PHP / MySQL) as I am a developer and specialist in both of those technologies I found it will be easier to customize something (when I get some time for that in the near future), after all, we just need to edit the source 😉

I have activated effectively my first blog on mid-1999 through Blogger if I well record, years before Google acquired it. Since then, I strongly believed that this will be the future of communications, news and media, and well, this is happening!

Anyway, I think blogging engines still have lots to evolve and I expect to do a small part on it, developing some tools and mashing up with Twitter, Google Wave, Skype, and who knows what else… The world has become social… And we need to do a better work, as it is ours, of the developers and systems architects, the responsability of make things happen !

Thanks for your patience.

Ps: WordPress iPhone App is simplistic and kinda cool, but have lots to evolve and implement… perhaps I’ll talk about it some other time.

The Advent of Social Network Aggregators (and Google Buzz strategic position)

To Aggregate… Be not mistaken.. That is the buzz for the social networks on those days…

Why is that?

Well.. With the advent of so many social networks, publishing engines, microblogging and every kind of community-driven systems, people get often the need to expand it’s networks ( with the socially imposed need to be found and to be read and to be seen, something almost mystical, that demands from one to be at each and every single buzz on the net or something catastrophically will happen, like to not be found by friends, family, co-workers, employers, …).

Nuff’ said, the one find himself with dozen networks and logins and profiles id’s / url’s, a complete mess, with no linking between one and another ( thought some systems allows integrations, it is just not enough ).

I can make a simple example of myself, with almost 50 social networks and profiles, blogs, microblogs, aggregators, issue systems, etc… Sometimes, even someone like myself ( a tech-addicted geek and systems developer with tons of helper tools, scripts, self-made apps, a great Mac machine, iPhone and strongly personal multitasking abilities ), find myself kinda lost in the middle of the multitude of information imposed by my idiotic impulse of technological omnipresence.

So, here it comes, at first, inside the very social systems, we start to find connections between one and another, like Facebook, Twitter, Blip, Youtube, and then came the unified login / data share social protocols like Google’s OpenSocial, OpenID, Twitter OAuth, etc… But yet, they simply did not fit the need, although some of those ideas and implementations carries lots of potential… they simply didn’t spread enough (yet?).

Google Profile, MeAdiciona.com and many others, tried a simpler, different approach… A simply HTML Page, with all other social nets linkings… But it seemed just a idiotic approach as it clearly didn’t fully integrate those multiple services and just provides links for the subject inside those gigantic amounts of social data, and the obvious need to get a account inside each of those sites, not to mention the lack of content as those services didn’t make any content indexing…

Then enters FriendFeed and some other services which do Index and monitors other social networks in order to provide centralized content in one single spot.

At the time I begin writing this little article ( September, 2009 ), and as I left this piece of article frozen since then, I didn’t knew Google Buzz, which is the exact approach I was expecting from a Social Network aggregator.

Of course Google Buzz is in the early stages of it’s own evolution, but the integration services and geolocation features are surely promising.

Then comes Facebook Connect and everything seems so sweet… Their approach to copy OpenID and to provide 3rd parties to use their information about users and even authenticate them on other sites and domains makes it strategically perfect for Facebook as their centralize user content and info and user login ( and keychains ) for other sites and domains.

We just have one little problem with Facebook Connect. I don’t think that business grade services are quite ready yet to allow employees and customers to use such a informal way to connect. Facebook is very personal and informal to provide authentication to business grade services ( even thought with web 2.0, the cloud is getting expanded with loads of social-network enabled business tools ). So this is a problem, but not for blogs, other social networks, microblogs, fotologs, etc…

What I miss the most is two-way sync with Twitter and more networks to integrate. Also, the possibility to act as a proxy between those many nets.

Well I guess that the future of press is something between iPhones, loads of iPads and integrated social networks, as information gatherers, pumping data to lots of social nets simultaneously.

Bear in mind that I wrote this article back in mid-2009 so, a lot have changed, now we have airplay and google tv, and believe the news market is going to be changed by them too.. But I guess this is another matter…

Anyway, I just wrote that to test the power of mobile posting with my iPhone on behalf of WordPress. It could be better but is definitively usable. Thanks.