Planet Voidspace

Google’s ‘unexplained phenomenon’ is generating lots of buzz this weekend. The company had done nothing but change its logo to a variant where one of the two O’s in its name was seemingly being abducted by an alien spaceship and tweet out a cryptic message that was translated “All Your O are belong to us,” a play on the good old “All your base are belong to us” meme. But it sure got people talking.

The Telegraph thought it had solved the mystery, but Andrew Healey begged to differ and offered multiple alternative answers and why they were all wrong. Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan got a vague statement from Google about the whole ordeal which mentioned an update would be coming in the following weeks.

This statement and the translated version of the Google Korea blog post about it (thanks GoogleUnexplainedPhenomenon.com) led us and many others to believe this is likely the first of a series of hints that Google will be using to provide clues to a puzzle.

And TechCrunch reader x pete offered a really good lead in the comments of our earlier post that could well have solved the mystery early.

Check out the website for the O Campaign, which is a “non-profit campaign forging alliances between the public, academia, corporations, and institutions in effort to efficiently channel resources for high-paced development of cutting-edge research in cancer prevention”. Looks like something Google would be involved with, right?

Now check out who is co-directing this admirable campaign: Thalas’ Joseph James Jung, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philantropist who currently spends his time collaborating with chief executives and boards of selected companies, universities and organizations. The first company that gets mentioned in his bio? You guessed it: Google.

Is this the explanation for the unexplained phenomenon and will Google be symbolically donating one of the letters of its company name to the campaign? Or just another wild stab in the dark?

The truth is out there, and we’re clearly not the only ones looking for it.

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Remember that online competition Microsoft Australia set up where they’d give away $10,000 to someone who found the cash, that was buried somewhere on the Internet? The aim was to promote Internet Explorer 8, and visitors of the campaign website as it was launched initially told users of other browsers to ‘get lost’ in rather rude way, which led to a Mozilla developer setting up a parodying website in response (and MS being forced to change the wording).

Anyway, the treasure hunt apparently ended quietly a while back, when the campaign’s Twitter account announced that on August 18 someone had successfully retrieved both a website address and the password needed to access it. The winner, Gavin Ballard, was announced 11 days ago and I just stumbled across this blog post on i.techreport who revealed that the website was FastSafePrivateBetter.com and the password was ‘Courval’.

When you go to that website and enter the password, you can download a document with all the answers to the clues that were provided by Microsoft in order to find where the $10,000 was ‘buried’. Or you can just download the doc here or view the answers in the embedded file below.

Reading the document, I have to admit the campaign was more elaborate than I’d have thought and actually quite clever. The clues that were transmitted through the campaign’s Twitter account (which currently only has about 3550 followers left) were apparently quite mind-challenging at times and often required the treasure hunter to use Microsoft’s and many other - some even competing - online products to solve the puzzles.

It took Ballard 67 clues and 65 days to get to the correct answer.

And now I’m wishing I had participated in the online treasure hunt too.

Ten Grand

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While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.

This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). This would be a rounding error for any major search engine, but at least it is going in the right direction. Its investors think so. They ponied up another $7 million in a new round at the end of last month

OneRiot started to be noticed when it added link search from Twitter last May. But its search volume didn’t really take off until it launched its API, allowing other sites to tap into its real-time search and add it as a feature to their own Web app or site. OneRiot has 40 API partners, including Microsoft (sometimes bundled with IE)., browser add-ons Yoono and Shareaholic, and desktop apps like Nambu and EventBox.

All of these API partnerships add up. In fact, about 80 percent of OneRiot’s searches are coming through its APIs rather than directly on its site. OneRiot is building up market share by offering real-time search to others. (Rival Collecta is preparing to do the same thing by offering its own APIs soon). Search is a volume game, where the more search queries you can process, the better your results become. So OneRiot wants to power as many real-time searches as possible.

To the extent that OneRiot can familiarize people with the concept of real-time search in as many places as possible, that’s a good thing. But ultimately it needs to drive people back to OneRiot.com where it can control the entire experience (and the cash).

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Glancing at TechCrunch late on Thursday evening, I immediately realised there was trouble afoot.

A few hours earlier, Sarah Lacy had published a post about the difficulties she’d had receiving her visa to Brazil to research her book and report on start-ups for TechCrunch. I’d read the post and sympathized with Sarah’s frustration. The problem, apparently, had been caused by an ‘upgrade’ of Brazilian embassy computer systems and the resulting havoc had affected everyone from journalists to business people to the coach of a national football - sorry, ’soccer’ - team.

As Sarah wrote, it also meant that she would now not be able to meet any of the scores of startups who had hoped to speak to a visiting TechCrunch reporter. If I were one of those startups, I’d be pissed. I’d be pissed at my government for not getting their technology together, and I’d be pissed generally that I’d missed an opportunity to showcase my business on a foreign stage. I might even post a comment saying as much.

Glancing at TechCrunch on Thursday evening, then, I half-expected to see maybe a couple of dozen comments on the post. But no. There were hundreds. Almost 500 in fact, and just about every one of them was attacking Sarah specifically, and American visa policy, generally.

How dare you insult Brazil!” they cried, “You stupid Americans demand that Brazilians have visas to visit your country; why shouldn’t we do the same?” Some of them used words like “reciprocity” and “pay back”. One even called Sarah a ‘gringa’, which was cute and in no way played to a stereotype. Many – who clearly knew all about the months of planning Sarah had done for her trip - angrily suggested that she should have started applying from the visa earlier. A vocal minority was additionally livid that the post was illustrated by a mashup - culled from Google images - of the Brazilian flag and the ‘EPIC FAIL’ meme. Some demanded criminal penalties for the outrage. It was whatever the Portuguese is for a train wreck.

Puzzled, I read the post again. Clearly I’d missed something on my first reading. Obviously Sarah – who, let’s remember, has been TC’s most vocal advocate for relaxing US visa laws for foreign entrepreneurs - had called for Brazil to be bombed back to the stone age, or suggested its womenfolk were unclean. But no, she really had just complained that a computer upgrade had inconvenienced her and thousands of other travelers who already had been approved for visas but who hadn’t been delivered them on the day they were promised.

As a foreigner on these shores, the subject is one close to my heart, which is why I’d read - and sympathised with - the post in the first place. Not long ago, I went through the visa process to relocate to the US from the UK. I had a far smoother experience than many of my European friends who are still flailing around in H1B or O1 hell, but I still had to struggle through a dull process of bureaucracy, money, police checks, paperwork, money, waiting, interviews, money and bullshit. And money.

In fact, the only truly smooth aspect came right at the end, once I’d been approved for the visa and was told my passport would be returned three days later. With that, I booked my flight and, sure enough, at exactly 9am on the third day, a courier arrived on my doorstep clutching my newly visa-d passport. Had there been an unexpected delay after being told I could make travel plans, I’d have been furious: there’s no excuse for missing deadlines when you’ve promised they’ll be met. Reciprocity and forward planning have nothing to do with it; it’s just bureaucratic sloppiness. On that front, the Brazilian embassy had failed. Epically.

And what about this flag business? I mean, seriously. If I understand you correctly, Brazilians, Photoshopping your national symbol with a joke meme is an unforgivable affront to your nationhood, and yet painting it across your girlfriend’s breasts at a soccer game or screen-printing it on a tiny g-string is a wonderful celebration of national identity? Maybe we Brits are just under-sensitive, but frankly you could Photoshop a defaced picture of the queen onto our flag and you wouldn’t hear a peep of complaint. Except perhaps that you stole our idea.

So if it wasn’t the visa issue, or the flag, really the only justification I could find for the Brazilian commenters’ rage was Sarah’s remark that her husband was worried about her traveling to the country due its reputation for violence.

This is of course typical American paranoia of all points foreign. “The natives are savages! We won’t be able to walk the streets in safety!” they whine, in a hideously unfair characterisation of a gentle, welcoming people. No wonder some Brazilians were upset with Sarah, to the point where they posted comments threatening to spit in her face and rape her.

And that’s where I realized that something was terribly awry. Sarah writes a story about bureaucratic ineptitude and broken promises, illustrated by a mildly clichéd Photoshop, and her safety is threatened by a mob of lunatic Brazilians. Arrington disses a few start-ups over the years and a mental German spits in his face at DLD. Erick writes a controversial headline about a multinational music service and the threats get so serious that TechCrunch has to call in the cops to protect its staff.

And that’s just the foreigners. The Americans are just as bad: last week Vivek Wadhwa received hundreds upon hundreds of furiously xenophobic responses to his guest post - many suggesting that the Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University was unwelcome on American soil. His crime? Suggesting that it should be easier for skilled foreign workers to get H1B visas. A suggestion, by the way, which was later linked to and supported by Newt Fucking Gingrich.

I don’t get it. Where am I going so wrong?

I was hired by TechCrunch specifically to be the controversial one. Unlike the rest of the writers here, who have actual reporting credentials, my whole shtick is saying inflammatory things and inciting furious debate among morons. To that end, in my very first column I declared war on anonymous commenters, making it absolutely clear how much I hate every last one of them, and even threatening to bludgeon the little basement-dwellers to death with their own Wil Wheaton action figures.

But nothing.

Since then I’ve tried to up my game. I’ve promoted scientifically dubious fad cleanses, I’ve called out lying company spokespeople and threatened to name and shame them, I’ve applauded Google for its anti-trust activities and suggested that Microsoft would commit genocide if it was commercially expedient. I’ve written an entire column attacking Drudge-reading Republican ditto heads who object to Obama’s attempts to control the Internet. Hell, I’ve even admitted to once being a magician.

But still nothing.

How is it possible I’ve attacked Republicans and not received my own death threats? What’s the point in them deliberately misinterpreting the spirit of the Second Amendment if they’re not going to use the handguns strapped to their thighs to intimidate a foreigner? Where are my globules of Teutonic sputum or my sickening threats of violence? What does a man have to do around here to get threatened with rape by a Brazilian?

Frankly, I’m starting to get worried for my job. Every week Arrington gets off on threatening to fire me - but so far I’ve clung on to the gig, mainly because I keep convincing him that I’ll be a source of controversy and excitement. And yet week in, week out I’m getting my ass handed to me by just about everyone else on TechCrunch. And they’re not even trying.

Clearly I have to up my game. Over the coming weeks the gloves are going to have to come off. I’m going to have to go all-out with deliberately provocative headlines and racist ledes in the hope of prompting a mob of moronically illiterate textually-violent misogynist dickweeds to abuse me. Only then will my controversy crown be restored and my survival here assured.

From next week then, you can look forward to column titles like…

“Did the state of Israel just pass data to the RIAA?”

“CBS’s acquisition of Last.fm: smartest American deal with a German since Werner von Braun?”

“US education hasn’t produced a decent one since Oklahoma: so why is it so hard for foreign bombers to get H1B visas?”

“The Fanboys from Brazil: why Latin American Mac users are even more insufferably smug than those in the rest of the world”

“The French are Lazy, Americans are fat, Brits have bad teeth, Palestinians are all terrorists and the Swiss got rich on Nazi gold - and it’s all the fault of AT&T”

“Fuck you, Belgium”

…and probably something about South Africans being boorish and ignorant. They’re always good for a fight.

And then, after I write those, I’m imploring the comment idiots amongst you to do your worst. Once you’ve finished skimming my words, misinterpreting my every premise and forming your knee-jerk, nationalistic response - please, please be sure to hack it out in the comments. Don’t worry about accuracy, grammar or even basic literacy: it’s a numbers game and you freaks are my last hope at keeping this gig.

After all, where will I be without my job as Controversialist in Residence at TechCrunch? Destitute, that’s where. A poor, jobless, bitter loser with a strange accent, forced to beg for money from my neighbors to survive.

Oh, God, I’ll be Welsh.

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Residents of San Francisco are a bit put off by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge this holiday weekend. For the next 2+ days, the short bridge commute between the city and the East bay is closed, forcing people to take 30 mile detours through Marin County to get to Oakland, Berkeley and beyond.

This is a perfect opportunity to test the map products on the major Internet portals. Who noted the temporary closure and helped users figure out the next best route?

The short answer - Google wins. Yahoo a close second, and Microsoft Bing fails in this particular test.

Google Maps notes the closure, telling users “The Bay Bridge is closed from September 4 to September 8. Try dragging your route to a different path.”

Yahoo also seems to know about the closure, but doesn’t mention it to users. Instead, it routes you 35 miles through Marin county and over two other bridges to get to your destination. This is useful, but without pointing out that the Bay Bridge is closed, most people will likely think it’s a glitch and simply try the easier route (and be disappointed).

Microsoft Bing fails this test completely. Oblivious to the current road conditions, it blithely tells users to use the Bay Bridge to zip on over to Oakland.

Thanks to Noah Veltman for the tip, and the stunning image of the Bay Bridge above was taken by Thomas Hawk.

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A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded Wordpress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the porn sites. And thought we had solved the problem. We didn’t.

They broke back in, but this time they did a lot more damage. They deleted about two months of my blog. Yes, I didn’t have a backup. I should learn to do backups (we’re doing them now). Life has a way of beating you if you don’t have backups.

Anyway, this time they also put some malicious code on my archive pages. Google sent me an email saying they had removed my blog from its index. That got a whole team to look into how they broke in. Now thanks to TechCrunch and Mashable you know there was a vulnerability in Wordpress which let them break in. Even more good details on Lorelle’s blog.

We’ve done some other things now to make it harder for them to break in (for instance, my admin account has been deleted and a new one doesn’t use the name “admin”), but the damage is done and I feel the same way when our childhood home was broken into. I don’t feel safe here, which might explain why I’ve been posting more over on a new Posterous blog I’ve setup.

Hopefully we’ve caught all the damage and hopefully other Wordpress users haven’t had worse damage happen to them. Have you been hit by Wordpress vulnerabilities? If so, what did you do to lock down the system?

Oh, and please upgrade your Wordpress immediately to the latest version. That seems to have fixed the hole that the jerks got in through on my blog. Knock on wood.

So, once this happens, how do you feel safe again?

UPDATE: Matt Mullenweg, who is the guy who runs Automattic, the company that produces Wordpress, wrote that I never had the problem on Wordpress.com (hosted version of Wordpress). That’s true. Interesting conversation going on over there with Matt.

The Tutorial Committee for PyCon 2010 in Atlanta is now accepting proposals
for classes. This year will feature 2 days of classes prior to the
"official" conference. These classes are 3-hour long sessions concentrating
on specific Python packages or techniques and are taught by some of the
smartest cookies in the Python Universe. Anything Python may be submitted

We’re hearing of numerous reports that older versions of WordPress are exposed to security threats. WordPress is one of the largest blogging engines with over 5,317,360 - and counting - downloads for their latest version, 2.8. Many large blogs, including TechCrunch, rely on WordPress to get the news out and post content online.

Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked:

First, there are strange additions to permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.

Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, hasn’t commented on this issue, but we’ll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, we urge you to update your WordPress blog immediately.

Update: We’ve reached out to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and he mentioned the following. Automattic is not the parent company of WordPress. Automattic contributes to WordPress.org like many other companies do. Mullenweg published a blog post mentioning what steps people should take to ensure their WordPress blog is safe.

(Image via Developer Tutorials)

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When Google officially joined Twitter back in February, its first message was sent in code. Earlier tonight, Google reverted to using a coded message on Twitter, with a cryptic tweet stating the following, “1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19″.

So what does it mean? It’s fairly straight-forward, actually, assuming you know your Internet memes. The code itself is a simple pattern, A=1, B=2, C=3 and so forth. Plugging it in, this translates to: “All your o are belong to us”.

That is in reference to the meme from the early 2000s, “All your base are belong to us,” a humorous saying that was popularized from a poor translation of a Japanese video game (video below). So where does the “o” come in? Attached to Google’s tweet is a TwitPic of its logo doodle today, which is an alien spaceship beaming up the second “o” in “Google.”

It’s not really clear why that is Google’s logo today; the logo just links to the Google result for “unexplained phenomenon,” which returns results mainly talking about Google’s odd logo today, and general alien conspiracies. Maybe someone at Google is just bored and wanted to play a game, or maybe they just saw District 9. The truth is out there.

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• Datejs - A JavaScript Date Library
  Lots of good date handling stuff in here

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review
• DEAD AIR SPACE
  FeelingPulledApartbyHorses/ TheHollowEarth 12inch

For a social site that is into sharing, it sure has taken Facebook a long enough time to embrace widgets. Sure, they launched a Fan Box widget back in July for companies and celebs with a Facebook Page, and a few other widgets before that. But how many peopel actually used them? Now, Facebook has a new widget center that brings them all together.

There are five widgets in all: a profile badge, a photo badge to share your Facebook photos elsewhere on the web, a Stream Box to share your stream, the aforementioned Fan Box, and a related Facebook Page badge. Like other widgets, you can embed these on your blog or elsewhere.

The live stream widget, of course, is my favorite. You can see what it looks like at right. There is an everyone tab and a Friends tab. The Friends tab is hwat I actually see in my stream when I log into Facebook. Now I can embed that stream anywhere and expose my view of my friends’ ramblings to a wider audience. In addition to reading the stream, you can comment and add likes to items from within the widget.

At least that is what it lets you do in the preview. I had trouble embedding the widgets in this post, which is why I resorted to screenshots except for the TechCrunch Page badge below (but that could just be an issue with the way we have WordPress set up on our site):

TechCrunch

Promote Your Page Too

And this is what the TechCrunch Fan Box looks like:

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Linda Avey, one of the two founders of personal genomics company 23andMe, is leaving the startup to start a new foundation dedicated to studying Alzheimer’s disease. Avey, who has been with the company for over three years, writes that the new foundation will make use of 23andMe’s research platform to “drive the formation of the world’s largest community of individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s, empower them with their genetic information and track their brain health using state-of-the-art tools”.

Avey notes that the foundation will be starting with the connection between Alzheimer’s and ApoE4, which helps in the breakdown of peptide plaques associated with the disease. The decision seems to be driven in part by personal reasons, as Avey’s father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s.

Avey sent the following Email to the 23andMe team:

Dear all-

As I trust you all know, 23andMe is very special to me. I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.

I’ve decided that I’d like to focus my efforts on an area that is personally significant and will continue to have a huge impact on our healthcare system–Alzheimer’s disease. Effective today, I’m leaving 23andMe and have begun making plans for the creation of a foundation dedicated to the study of this disorder. The foundation will leverage the research platform we’ve built at 23andMe–the goal is to drive the formation of the world’s largest community of individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s, empower them with their genetic information and track their brain health using state-of-the-art tools. We’ve always planned to include Alzheimer’s in our 23andWe research mission…I’m just approaching it from a new angle.

Some of you might be aware that my father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s and passed away last year. For this reason, Randy and I are motivated to do what we can to improve the understanding of what leads to the debilitating symptoms and what might prevent them from starting in the first place. The ApoE4 association is barely understood but gives us a great starting point.

I’ll miss working with you but will be excited to hear about the progress I know you’ll be making!

All the best,
Linda

Anne Wojcicki, who founded the company with Avey and is also noted for being Sergey Brin’s wife, sent out the following letter.

Team:

As Linda has told you, she will be leaving 23andMe to focus her energy on transforming Alzheimer’s research and treatment, leveraging the 23andMe platform. While I am quite sad to see her leave I am excited and hopeful as she takes on this mission. As Linda’s co-founder and partner over the last three years, it has been clear that revolutionizing research has been a primary passion. Our drive to change health care has always had roots in our personal lives and we have tried to structure 23andMe so that any individual or organization could actively participate in research. Linda and I have talked about doing research in Alzheimer’s since the inception of the company and the need for the Alzheimer’s community to have a strong leader. With Linda’s involvement, I believe that the APOE4 community could be the first asymptomatic community to successfully develop preventative treatments. I hope that going forward we’ll both be able to shake up and transform the health care space, making health care and treatments better for all.

Linda’s departure is also a sign of 23andMe’s maturation. When we started the company, the personal genetics industry did not exist; now it is a thriving and competitive landscape. Our company has grown and we continue to be an innovative industry leader. While our success has been exceptional, it is also clear we have a lot of work ahead. We have created a significant and empowering tool, but we must find new and better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA. In the weeks ahead, we will outline a strategy for the company that we believe will make genetics a routine part of health care and will lead us to making significant research discoveries.

Linda has been instrumental in making 23andMe what it is today and we thank her for her passion and dedication to the company. We have many exciting opportunities before us, and I look forward to working with all of you to make 23andMe a spectacular success.

Anne

Worth pointing out is Wojcicki’s statement that 23andMe needs to find “better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA”. That may be tricky — while there are some traits that are well understood, this is a field that is still in its infancy and the relationships between our genes and most traits are murky. At some point personal genomics will play a key role in our health care system, but I’m not sure we’re there yet.

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As we alluded to two days ago, the location-based social network Foursquare has just raised its first round of funding. PaidContent found out about the seed round through an SEC document, and we’ve confirmed the round with the company.

As expected, Union Square Ventures is one of the investors, but also participating in the round is O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and some angel investors, that co-founder Dennis Crowley was not ready to reveal at this point. The round is in fact $1.35 million.

For weeks, there has been plenty of talk about how Union Square’s Fred Wilson has taken a liking to the New York-based company. But it’s not Wilson who will be joining Foursquare’s board, instead that will be Union Square’s Albert Wenger.

Foursquare has been a hot startup among some tech early adopters, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York. The service is primarily used through its iPhone application right now, but it just launched an Android version, as we first reported two days ago. A BlackBerry app will be available in the coming weeks as well, and a Windows Mobile app could be available as soon as next month. There is also a mobile web interface that users can use.

Recently, Foursquare has started doing some things with its app to show the potential of using location for a business model. The company has started alerting users when there is a deal at a venue nearby. Right now, these deals are centered around “mayors” of places, meaning if a person has checked-in the most times at a location. Some venues are starting to offer deals like free beer to mayors, as it obviously benefits them to get people wantin to come back more to check-in.

Foursquare is an interesting player in the location space in that it’s just as much of a game as anything else. Users compete for mayorships, and try to earn badges and get points for checking in more places. The idea of the “check-in” rather than a constantly updated background location, also differentiates it, and makes some people less uneasy about the location tracking aspect, since you have to explicitly check-in at a location.

Foursquare was started by Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, after Crowley rather famously left Google not exactly pleased with the company after they bought his previous (similar) startup Dodgeball, and decided to do nothing with it. This past January, Google officially deadpooled it. Crowley maintains that he has a good relationship with Google now despite what happened.

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This past Monday, when my co-workers asked me what I did over the weekend, I casually mentioned that I ran a 197 mile race. Thankfully, Hood to Coast is a relay, so I finished with my legs intact after journeying from Mount Hood to Seaside, Oregon with 11 other Googlers.

Team Google One was comprised of Googlers from the AdSense, AdWords and engineering groups. We competed against more than 1,000 other teams, including blazing fast running shoe companies and other tech companies.

We kicked off the first leg near the top of Mount Hood at 6:45 pm last Friday, as our first runner barreled down 4,000 feet of elevation. During the relay, each team member ran three legs, varying in distance from three to eight miles. At exchanges, the current runner handed off a snap bracelet baton and cheered on his swiftly departing teammate. When not running, we wolfed down PB&J's, and slept in the vans or in massive congregations of sleeping bags along the road.

We started with the sun setting over dramatic gray-blue mountains and ran through the night as reflective vests became fireflies flickering down country roads. We finished at 2:25 pm Saturday afternoon in 19 hours and 40 minutes on the beach where a funk band was laying down some grooves. The time earned us eighth place overall and second place in the corporate division, according to the still unofficial results (PDF).

In addition to medals, we walked away with sore legs, cross-office friendships and some great stories.

Team Google One pauses for a moment as we prepare to descend Mount Hood

Posted by Matt Kane, Associate, Consumer Operations

It has been a big goal of mine to make importlib the default implementation of import for CPython. But an even bigger goal has been to make it the default implementation for ALL full featured implementations of Python once they implement Python 3. Not only would it make sure that all VMs have consistent semantics when it came to imports, but to also prevent every VM from having to re-implement import themselves.

It’s pretty easy these days to think of AT&T as a giant corporation of demons sent to Earth to destroy iPhone users’ productivity. But apparently, it is a company just like any other, with humans working for it. How do we know? There is video evidence.

Apple 2.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt posted a video of Seth Bloom today, an AT&T rep that is also know as “Seth the blogger guy.” In this video, Bloom explains AT&T’s iPhone MMS service, which was finally announced the other day (set for September 25), as well as some of the issues that plague AT&T’s network due to his smartphone usage (read: iPhone usage).

We’ve actually been working with Bloom for a number of months as AT&T issues have continued to mount. He’s quite helpful in answering the questions that he’s allowed to answer, which we appreciate. The problem Bloom has is that he can only answer questions, he can’t actually solve AT&T’s problems. And while the network is trying, it’s still not where it needs to be in many regards.

But that’s why these videos are good, they humanize AT&T. Rather than having us cite an AT&T spokesperson talking about the issues they’re facing, it’s good to put a face to the problems. Again, this doesn’t solve them, but hearing them explained from AT&T is a smart play. Certainly smarter than saying nothing.

Of course, as Elmer-DeWitt notes, Bloom has actually been doing these videos for a while, but when AT&T starting running into some reason problems over the summer, he went silent. Now he’s back that AT&T has some good news to offer (MMS). If anything, we could use these videos more when AT&T is having issues.

Speaking of those issues, PC World has a rather ridiculous headline today, “Network Woes? Hate the iPhone, Not AT&T.” The main idea is that it’s the iPhone fault for AT&T’s service issues because it’s so popular and is overloading their network. That’s undoubtedly true, but it completely skirts around the fact that we’re all paying a large amount of money for a service that is completely unreliable.

It would be much easier to cut AT&T a break in that regard if they were to say, offer up discounts to paying customers for poor service performance. It’s simply hard to feel bad for a company you’re paying in excess of $100 a month to, for a service they’re failing to provide.

It’s certainly a fair point that the massive success of the iPhone likely would have overloaded any company, including Verizon. But if anything, that speaks to why we need to get rid of the exclusivity agreements.

Watch Bloom below:

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The battle between Dish and TiVo rages on. As reported by Bloomberg, a judge has ruled that Dish and EchoStar must pay TiVo around $200 million for continuing to provide DVR service to its customers after being told to stop because it was violating TiVo’s patents. Dish and EchoStar plan to appeal the ruling.

The new ruling brings Dish and EchoStar’s total payments to TiVo to around $400 million in damages and other fees after a five year legal battle. In this latest round, Dish and EchoStar say they tried to work around TiVo’s patents, but a judge ruled that they had failed to do so. The $200 million figure is based on a $2.25 per month royalty for every Dish DVR user, extending from April 2008, when an appeals court reaffirmed TiVo’s patent, to July 1 2009.

It could have been worse. TiVo was looking for nearly $1 billion — or all of Dish’s DVR profits — as it accused Dish and EchoStar of willingly infringing on its patent. The judge ruled that the infringement had been unwilling (in other words, the companies had tried to work around the patent but failed to do so), hence the smaller penalty.

None of this bodes well for AT&T and Verizon, who are also being sued by Tivo for infringing on its “Time Warping” patent.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Indian software company HealthHiway has raised $4 million in an unattributed round of funding from Greylock Partners. Based in Bangalore, India, HealthHiway provides web-based software to help hospitals, clinics, insurance providers, pharmacies and diagnostic centers collaborate on billing, patient records, x-rays and claims.

Launched in 2007, HealthHiway was started by the Apollo Hospital Group, one of the largest healthcare groups in India, and offers clients a number of software products.
ClinicConnect organizes patient registration and medical records, ClaimsExchange is an online claims processing system, and ImageConnect captures and processes radio images such as X-rays, CTs and MRIs that can then be shared.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here’s a quick sample:

• Senior Developer
  Threadless - Chicago, IL

• VP, Products
  TokBox, Inc. - San Francisco, CA

• Senior Operations Engineer
  SlideShare - San Francisco, CA

• Marketing Manager
  TrialPlay- Mountain View, CA

• Operations Manager, Digital Media International
  MTV Networks International - New York, NY

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Video Games - E3 2009 - Attack of the Show

What’s the deal with Comcast, Verizon, and other ISPs petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of broadband? It’s all about money—broadband stimulus money—MG Siegler explains on G4’s Attack of the Show.

As the Obama administration looks to expand broadband access to rural and urban areas that are still under-served, the ISPs want to lower what constitutes broadband so that they can get some of the billions of dollars in stimulus money without shelling out as much to actually deliver the broadband access the stimulus package is designed to create.

Those phone and cable companies are tricky. Watch the video above.

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We’re happy to show off our new TechCrunch50 logo this morning. The old logo, which is below, was getting a little stale.

The logo was created by DESIGN about TOWN, who worked with us over the last few weeks on a number of concepts.

The goal of the logo is to convey a sense of community and discussion. Thus, the text chat bubble. Real time feedback from the audience and judges to launching startups is a crucial part of the culture of TechCrunch50.

Our apologies to Apple, who may think they now own the idea of a text bubble. If you want to discuss, you know where to find us. And we promise we were locked into this design before the news about the supposed trademark.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yesterday, China’s Ministry of Culture (MoC), warned that it would strengthen checks and policing of online music content. The MoC said that search engines, which have been a source of pirated music in China, can only provide search information for tracks from legitimate music companies. This move may pose as a serious problem for China’s most popular search engine Baidu, which has long faced legal issues surrounding its index of pirated music.

According to the report, the MoC is requiring that companies providing online music streams or downloads gain approval as “Internet culture companies,” and only companies that have directly obtained broadcasting or licensing rights can apply for approval. Imported music that is already broadcast online in China but has not been approved must be submitted to the MoC before December 31, 2009.

The impact this will have on Baidu is noted by Pali Research’s analyst Tian Hou, who estimates that as much as 80 percent of Baidu’s traffic is from music search. Hou says that with respect to music search results, most of the links provided are posted by illegitimate music companies. If these links are cut off, says Hou, traffic to Baidu could decrease.

According to comScore, Baidu had 145 million unique visitors in July of 2009 worldwide (with more than 95 percent of those coming from Asia), while its MP3 search engine attracted 47 million uniques, which is only 32 percent but still significant. For July, Baidu was ranking fifth amongst most visited search engines worldwide, behind Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com.

The success of Baidu has been credited to its index of music which is available from its front page, something Google caught onto last year when it entered a joint venture with Top100.cn to offer free and legal music in China. Baidu’s potential troubles could be good news for Google China, which took the beta label off of its music search engine this March and signed major deals to license music from four major music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony). Google China, however, just lost its top executive, Kaifu Lee.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I'm back from the Middle of Nowhere. I had a wonderful time with no internet, email or twitter. It was fine and fabulous. I caught up on my sleep. Amanda even persuaded me to go jogging with her in the Scottish rain.

In most cities across America, Walmart has replaced Main Street as the place people go to do their shopping and mingle with each other. But what is it about Walmart that brings out the—how do I say this delicately?—fashion-challenged freaks. I am talking about people who cover themselves in cheetah-print garb or worse, Easter eggs and bunnies. They are a tiny sliver of the people who go Walmart, but they are fascinating in a human train wreck kind of way. You want to avert your eyes, but you can’t stop looking.

A satirical site called People of Walmart now lets you stare to your heart’s content without actually stepping inside a Walmart store. People can submit photos of the strangest people they encounter in Walmart. As the site’s About section explains:

Let’s face it; we all have seen the people who obviously don’t have mirrors and/or family and friends to lock them in a basement, and they all seem to congregate at Walmart.

Below are a few choice pictures from the site. Sometimes the cars are even better (yes, that is a spoiler on that clunker). People of Walmart, don’t ever change. Except for the woman wearing the swastika sweatshirt. She should definitely change.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

== Announcing the 1st meeting of the Athens Python User Group ==
If you live near Athens, Greece and are interested in meeting fellow
Python programmers, meet us for a friendly chat at the Eleftheroudakis
Bookstore café, on Wednesday 9 September, 7:00pm.
If you plan to attend, please add a comment here: [link]

With more and more kids going online, whether to connect over social networking sites, mingle in chat rooms or play games, it's become increasingly important for families, schools and service providers to work together to ensure that the younger generation understands their responsibilities while they explore the virtual world.

A few weeks ago, Google participated in the 21st Annual Crimes Against Children Conference in Dallas, where over 3,500 members of law enforcement, child advocacy groups, the tech industry and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) convened to share ideas, discuss strategies and explore new technologies designed to combat the many and varied forms of crimes against children. We had the opportunity to describe some of the positive steps Google is taking to educate and safeguard minors who use our products and services, as well as the unique ways we support the individuals on our staff who do child exploitation-related work.

According to a recent NCMEC study in patterns and trends in online child victimization, the past few years have seen a 6% increase in reports of kids providing images and videos of themselves when asked by online acquaintances; sending naked photos of themselves through text messages ("sexting"); and cyber-bullying. This new trend underscores the need to educate our younger users, their families and teachers on ways to create and enjoy safe online experiences.

We're doing our part by working with child safety organizations and law enforcement around the globe to spread positive messages about life online. For example, in mid-September, we're launching a global training program on YouTube to help teens teach other teens about these issues. This is just one step among many that we're taking to help create a generation of responsible digital citizens.

Posted by Alice Wu, Policy Specialist, YouTube

A location-based social network is not going to truly take off on the iPhone until it can run in the background. You know it, I know it, and even Loopt, which makes such an app, knows it. That’s why they’ve done something about it.

Beginning today, Loopt is rolling out a trial for background location on the iPhone. Yes, you read that right.

If you’ve been following the iPhone at all over the past couple of years, you’re undoubtedly asking yourself how this is possible, since the device does not allow third party apps to run in the background. Has Apple changed its mind about background apps? Not yet. Instead, Loopt is partnering with other companies in the mobile industry for what it’s calling “Always-On Location Service.”

Loopt co-founders Sam Altman and Alok Deshpande would not disclose the names of any of these partners, noting that the system set up to make this happen is very “complex” and involves a number of players. But at least one of them has to be AT&T, which is, of course, the network the iPhone runs on. Loopt, which seems to be particularly good at carrier relationships, has cut deals with AT&T in the past.

What this means is that these guys have gotten around the iPhone’s limitation by keeping a pipeline open on AT&T’s side that is constantly sending your location data to Loopt. This doesn’t require any app to be running on your iPhone — not even Loopt — and the location data will be sent even when you’re on a call or surfing the web on your iPhone. Most importantly, because there is no app required to do this, it doesn’t drain your battery life, Altman tells us.

So what does Apple think about all of this? Altman refused to comment on that, but given the cordial relationship Loopt has had with Apple (being featured both at WWDC last year and in an iPhone commercial), it seems likely that the two sides at least talked about this before Loopt pulled the trigger. That said, because no application is actually involved in this process, it looks like Loopt has essentially found a loophole around Apple on this one.

Privacy will undoubtedly be a major concern with such a feature. But Altman notes that you have to go to a website to actually sign up for this, and you can turn it off or on at anytime on that site or via an SMS message. And he believes some of privacy concerns will fade as people get used to such services. “The future of location-based services is always-on,” he says.

I agree, this seems like a huge win for Loopt (well, if users are okay with paying for the service, more on that below). I’ll be using it a lot more now because first of all, I don’t actually have to open the app to update — but more importantly, none of my contacts will either. So oddly, I probably will be opening the app itself more now too because of that. And eventually, you could see such background location functionality playing a roll in advertising on the iPhone.

They way this will work is that you will be able to receive alerts (emails or text messages) when people or places of interest are nearby to your current location. Loopt can also now build what it calls a “Life Graph” for you — basically, keep a log of where you’ve been. Again, this will be opt-in.

Altman would not comment on if its competitors like Whrrl or Brightkite could also strike similar deals, but Deshpande confirms that no one else is offering this (at least not yet). And Loopt is getting ready to come out with a version 2.0 of its iPhone app that should take on other competitors like Foursquare.

As it seems clear that AT&T is the key factor in making something like this happen, it’s nice to see them doing something innovative to actually help their iPhone customers get a feature that many of us have long wanted. Assuming it works well, it might even be enough to make us forget the whole months-late MMS thing.

But this good news has a price. $3.99 a month, to be specific, which users can sign up for on this site. Initially, Loopt is going to limit the trial to 5,000 testers.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here.

[photo: flickr/Rev Dan Catt]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Sometimes all you need is a map to see where a company is going, or where it got on the wrong track. Take a look at the eBay acquisitions above plotted as a subway map created by the folks at MeetTheBoss. Click on it for a larger, clearer map. (They also did the same thing for Amazon acquisitions).

The map is color-coded, with different subway lines representing different categories of acquisitions.  As long as eBay sticks to central lines close to its main business, its acquisitions have done pretty well.  For instance, the yellow line is online auctions (iBazaar, Internet Auction Co., GMarket), orange is retail (Half.com, Shopping.com), and violet is e-commerce (PayPal, Bill Me Later, StubHub).

It’s when eBay has veered off far away from its core business that it’s gotten into trouble.  You can see that here by the darker orange VOIP line (Skype), the red Social line (StumbleUpon), and brown Auction House line (remember Butterfield & Butterfield?).  Even the pink Classifieds line has been a mixed bag.  eBay’s investment in Craigslist certainly didn’t help it much, and it is still struggling to make a splash in the U.S.

Fortunately, eBay’s current management is getting back on the right track by selling Skype and getting rid of distractions such as StumbleUpon.

(Hat tip to reader Ciaran Duffy).

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Some time ago I joined a family for dinner, and they had a two-year-old. During dinner, the two-year-old accidentally knocked over her glass, and liquid quickly spread across the table. The adults at the table sprang into action, containing the spill on the table, wiping it up, and checking for leakage onto the floor.

After all the excitement died down, the two-year-old looked down, saw the empty glass, and threw her hands up in the air, proudly announcing, "I drank it all!"

The details have been changed since they aren't important but the lesson is the same.

A customer had the following problem with a command-line tool:

I've created a taglist but I can't seem to get it to work with the track command. When I ask it to track the taglist, it can't find it. But if I ask for all my taglists, there it is.

C:\> show taglists
You have 2 taglists:
 active (8 tags)
 closed (6 tags)

C:\> track active
No such tag "active".

Yes, the track command isn't working, but let's take a closer look at that error message. It says no such tag. Strange, because you are trying to track a taglist, not a tag. Shouldn't the error message be no such taglist?

Aha, the problem is that the track command takes a list of tags on the command line, not a taglist name. The error message is correct: There is no such tag called active. Because active isn't a tag name; it's a taglist name.

C:\> track -taglist active
Taglist "active" is now being tracked.

Today's lesson: Look carefully at what the error message complaining about; it may not be what you expect.

Exercise: Diagnose the following error message, given no information about the program being used beyond what is presented here:

I accidentally made a change (transaction number 12345) to the file XYZ, and I want to back it out. But when I run the backout command, I get an error. Can somebody help me?

C:\> backout 12345
12345 - file not found

The Onion, America’s Finest News Source and easily one of the best destinations for quality satire if we ever visited one, strikes yet again. Not only is it wiping the floor with real journalism on Google News Spotlight - a new section dedicated to in-depth journalism work - but it is also lovingly feeding the dinosaurs satirical stories that wind up getting reported as actual news.

Two Bangladeshi newspapers, The Daily Manab Zamin and New Nation, have been forced to apologize to the public today after having regurgitated a news article taken from The Onion website which claimed the Moon landings were faked.

The fake news article in question said Neil Armstrong had told a news conference he had been “forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos and reading several blog posts” by a conspiracy theorist.

From the BBC:

The Daily Manab Zamin said US astronaut Neil Armstrong had shocked a news conference by saying he now knew it had been an “elaborate hoax”.

Neither they nor the New Nation, which later picked up the story, realised the Onion was not a genuine news site. Both have now apologised to their readers for not checking the story.

“We thought it was true so we printed it without checking,” associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency. “We didn’t know the Onion was not a real news site.”

Solid gold, and this quote from the tabloid newspaper’s associate editor fake news article truly puts the icing on top of the cake:

“I suppose it really was one small step for man, one giant lie for mankind.”

Keep on doing what you’re doing, The Onion. We love you.

(Via @minorissues)

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Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Meal Ready to Eat).

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A little while back, I received one of the most awesome things one can receive via post: a steak dinner. However, in my write-up of the steak dinner I never mentioned how they tasted. Rick Hiester was curious about that, and decided to take action. "I've never had Omaha Steaks before, so in the interest of sending an 'ultra-awesome souvenir' and learning how they taste, here's a second round."

Not pictured: large styrofoam box packed with dry ice

Can do, Rick! Eating food is definitely one of my strong points. However, given the sheer quantity of mailed meat — 6 steaks and 8 burgers — I decided to bring in some help. My first choice was an office cookout, but my coworkers generally try to avoid me, and an after-hours event doesn't fit in with that goal. Instead, I brought in my lawyer (Mr. Van Dress, co-discoverer of The Perch), my insurance agent, and our respective wives.

 

We grilled everything rare/medium-rare, as that's really the only way to eat meat, and chowed down. Overall, it was pretty good: the meat was tender, fresh tasting (i.e. it didn't taste like a frozen steak), and not too fatty.

Can I say that Omaha Steaks are significantly better than the local grocery store? Truthfully, I cannot. While the portions are a little smaller, I'd say they are definitely on par with the higher quality cuts available at the butcher counter. But are Omaha Steaks more awesome? Absolutely! There's just something to be said about receiving steaks by mail.

But in any case, thanks, Rick! The steaks were very much appreciated: we all enjoyed them. I'd love to send you a TDWTF mug, but the folks at Omaha Steaks would not share with me your address, email, or even pass along a message. Should you want to, drop me a line.

 

"Enjoy!" writes Gabriel Goldberg (Falls Church, VA). Enclosed was pond mosquito poison, a lifeware key fob, a few misc things, and best of all, a key fob from the Microsoft Windows 95 World Tour (slogan The Sky's the limit).

 

"I went to a Metastorm User Conference," Doogal Bell (Surrey, UK) wrote, "here is some of the junk I got."

 

"This is an Ale-8-1," writes David Mayo (Winchester, KY), "it's Kentucky's best soft drink. I found it in the trunk of my car. The expiration date is listed as 'JUN1807' which was just two years ago, so I'm sure it's fine. I mailed it to you so that I will not be tempted to drink it this evening, as it is highly caffeinated and I have to work very early tomorrow morning in Winchester, the birthplace of Ale-8-1."

 

"I was in Hanovo for the Magic: The Gathering Graid Prix," writes Adam Cetnerowski (Poland), and got one of the artists to autograph a card to Daily WTF." Thanks Adam, this is so going in my Thrull deck.

 

"This meadal was given to all employess of WM-data's Estonian office," Indrek (Estonia) writes, "it was given to us following the company's takeover by LogicaCMG and subsequent re-renaming to Logica."

 

"Congratulations," writes raQ (Quebec), "you are now a millionaire!"

 

"I found these things around my house," Joe Czepil writes, "just in case you have to re-file your 2007 taxes, I included a brand new copy of Tax Cut 2007."

 

"The reason I'm not going to cash the Google AdWords check is because its processing would cost me $10," writes Arkadijs Sislovs (Riga, Latvia), "I've also enclosed shower.jpg, which shows a China-produced shower cabin that is so advanced that it is controlled by the 'Shower Computer ststem'!"

 

Raymond Lee (England) sent six pence, a 1GB USB Drive (no contents), and a gigantic paperclip.

 

"automobus" (Lincolnwood, IL) sent this Dilbert Posterbook, straight out of 1997.

 

Julan Dax and Jens Schomburg (Siegen) sent a sticker and postcard featuring their University, along with the first German Wikimedia newspaper, and a coupon for jondos. I didn't realize that Wikimedia had transcended into print, or really that the "Wiki" concept even worked in print.

 

Matias Korhonen (Finland) sent some Finnish comics, real estate listings in Finland, a German coaster, a one-day ticket to the Flow Festival in Helsinki, and a used ticket to a Kraftwerk concert. Strangely absent (considering it was from Finland) was Salmiak, the tar-like emetic that tastes about as pleasant as syrup of ipecac.

 

"Enjoy these odds and ends," writes John Yearous (Winona, MN), "there's a bit of everything in here!" And John wasn't kidding. The minature Maglite was one of the cooler things I've seen in a long while, and the Superman Hero Gear solves the Halloween Problem."

 

Joshua M. Armstrong (Milwaukee, WI) not only sent a whole bunch of awesome stuff (including a $2 Bill, 1976 series), but took a picture of it and described all of the contents.

 

---

Don't forget to snail-mail in your own souvenirs for some TDWTF stickers. Ultra-awesome souvenirs (like, say, steak) could even get you a TDWTF mug.

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0, and has helped organize a summit next week to talk about what that might mean.

Today, many people equate Web 2.0 with social media; three or four years ago, they equated it with AJAX applications and APIs. Many are now starting to think it’s all about cloud computing. In fact, it’s all of these and more. The way I have always defined Web 2.0, it’s been about what it means for the internet, rather than the personal computer, to be the dominant computing platform. What are the rules of business and competitive advantage when the network is the platform?

So too with Government 2.0. A lot of people equate the term with government use of social media, either to solicit public participation or to get out its message in new ways. Some people think it means making government more transparent. Some people think it means adding AJAX to government websites, or replacing those websites with government APIs, or building new cloud platforms for shared government services. And yes, it means all those things.

But as with Web 2.0, the real secret of success in Government 2.0 is thinking about government as a platform. If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’ve built on their work and multiplied its impact. Microsoft put “a PC on every desk and in every home,” the internet connected those PCs, Google enabled a generation of ad-supported startups, Apple turned the phone market upside down by letting developers loose to invent applications no phone company would ever have thought of. In each case, the platform provider raised the bar, and created opportunities for others to exploit.

There are signs that government is starting to adopt this kind of platform thinking.

Behind Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s data.gov site is the idea that government agencies shouldn’t just provide web sites, they should provide web services. These services, in effect, become the government’s SDK (software development kit). The government may build some applications using these APIs, but there’s an opportunity for private citizens and innovative companies to build new, unexpected applications. This is the phenomenon that Jonathan Zittrain refers to as “generativity“, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not envisioned by their creators.

And of course, much as happened with the rise of commercial web services, “hackers” have been battering at the gates for some time. Adrian Holovaty’s chicagocrime.org (now part of everyblock.com) was the second-ever Google Maps mashup, back in 2005. It showed the world just how much value could be created by putting government data on a map. Most of the winners of Washington D.C.’s Apps for Democracy contest are direct descendants of chicagocrime. Similarly, Openstreetmap started out using crowdsourcing to create free maps in the UK, where map data is expensive; their move to build better maps for Palestine led to contributions from the UN and European community.

We’re starting to see formal efforts to develop an application ecosystem at the local, state, and federal level, via contests like Apps for Democracy, Apps for America, and other similar programs. Startups like SeeClickFix are pushing for standardized APIs to government services (like Open311). But there’s still a long way to go.

My goal at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington DC is to encourage more of this kind of platform thinking. We’ve brought in leaders from some of the most important platform providers in the tech world—Vint Cerf, the creator of TCP/IP, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Craig Mundie of Microsoft, among others—to talk about what makes tech platforms tick. We’re bringing together people like GSA CIO Casey Coleman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to talk about what the government can learn from the private sector about building cloud computing infrastructure, and especially how to make interoperable clouds. We’re looking beyond the obvious, as in our on-stage conversation with Google chief economist Hal Varian, talking about the role that measurement and “real time economics” plays in the success of Web 2.0 platforms. We’ll try to apply these insights to some of the big initiatives facing the Federal government, including health care and education. And of course, we’ll be engaging with the architects of the government’s internet strategy, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, White House new media head Macon Phillips, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, as well as leaders from the military and intelligence sector.

In one of my prep calls with Craig Mundie, he pushed forcefully for the idea that killer apps drive platform adoption. It strikes me that the killer app may already be here; we just don’t give the government enough credit for it. I’m talking about the wonderful world of geolocation, with GPS devices in cars providing turn-by-turn directions, phone applications telling you when the next bus is about to arrive, and soon, augmented reality applications telling you what’s nearby. It’s easy to forget that GPS, like the original internet, is a service kickstarted by the government. Here’s the key point: the Air Force originally launched GPS satellites for its own purposes, but in a crucial policy decision, agreed to release a less accurate signal for commercial use. The Air Force moved from providing an application to providing a platform, with the result being a wave of innovation in the private sector.

Location is the key to the relevance of government to its citizenry, as well as to a host of non-governmental services. But there are already disputes about who owns the data. For example, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority issued a takedown order against the StationStops iPhone application. This is exactly the kind of bad policy that we hope to remedy by shedding light on best practices in government platform building.
.
It’s easy to forget just how generative government interventions can be. The internet itself was originally a government-funded project. So was the interstate highway system. Would WalMart exist without that government intervention? Would our cities thrive without transportation, water, power, garbage collection and all the other services we take for granted? Like an operating system providing services for applications, government provides functions that enable private sector activity.

It’s important for the idea of “government as platform” to reach well beyond the world of IT. It was Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems.

In some of my recent talks, I’ve used an image originally proposed by Donald Kettl in The Next Government of the United States. Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices.

In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?

We have an enormous opportunity right now to make a difference. There’s a receptivity to new ideas that we haven’t seen in a generation. Government at all levels has put out the call for help. It’s up to the tech community to respond, with our ideas, with our voices, with our creativity, and with our code.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Center for American Progress)

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Amazon is making good after killing copies of 1984 for the Kindle. As you recall, Amazon had to recall the electronic version of the book for copyright reasons.

Purchasers will receive a copy of the book for the Kindle or $30 in credit for Amazon products or a check. So either you can get one book or cash for two or more books.

Giz has the full text of emails being sent to folks who bought the book:

Hello,

On July 23, 2009, Jeff Bezos, our Founder and CEO, made the following apology to our customers:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com”

As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made. You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30.

Please email Kindle customer support at kindle-response@amazon.com to indicate your preference. If you prefer to receive a check, please also provide your mailing address.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Kindle Team

Well that’s nice! Amazon made two mistakes here - they didn’t pay attention to copyright ownership and they didn’t pay attention to the implications of destroying copies of 1984. If this were My Life in France or a Clive Cussler novel, I doubt it would have created such a buzz. However, the irony and newsworthiness of the destruction essentially made this explode. Amazon will probably send flowers next time they have to delete a book like this - and I know they will - in order to head all the outrage off at the pass.

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Allen Hurff, the former SVP of Engineering at MySpace who left the company earlier this Summer, will apparently be launching a startup incubator as his next venture. An anonymous tipster points us to the man’s LinkedIn profile, where his current activity is listed as ‘Facilitator of the WebSquared Era at SoCal Incubator (Name Not Disclosed)’.

So all we know at this point is that the incubator is or will be based in Southern California and that there’s no name for it yet. It might be called WebSquared actually, because as Trendslate correctly points out Hurff also reserved a Twitter account named @websquared. In case you don’t know, ‘Web Squared’ is a name that’s being kicked around as the (in my opinion just as ridiculous) successor to the late ‘Web 2.0′ term.

Hurff spent four years working for MySpace, where he and former SVP Operations Jim Benedetto were largely reponsible for building up the company’s technology team (Benedetto left the company last March). Hurff also played an integral role in MySpace’s adoption of OpenSocial, serving as Chairman of the foundation.

We’re contacting Hurff for more information and will update when we hear back.

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Google announced today that Kai-Fu Lee, president of the search giant’s China operations, has left the company to start a new venture. Lee joined Google four years ago from Microsoft, where he was a corporate vice president, and the Redmond software giant subsequently sued Google over the hire, contending that Lee’s duties at Google would violate the terms of a non-compete agreement he signed as part of his Microsoft employment contract. The three parties later reached a settlement.

Google said Kai-Fu Lee is leaving to work on his own venture, but not content with knowing so little about the man’s plans for the future, I turned to Google’s Translate service to learn more.

The goal: translate Lee’s blog post and tweets in English for more clarity on the matter. The result: hilarity.

Take this tweet for example. This is what Lee is saying, according to Google Translate:

“To continue to talk to my employees interesting: in 2006 in Jiangsu and Zhejiang Kai-Fu hosted exchange, just who is in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Tina, or exchange to another table, called a la carte Kai-Fu advisory matters. Kai-Fu Lee to smoked tea duck and after the class Meat recommended that the vegetables you casually Come on, anyway, are not tasty Where could they be to eat, when the drug ate enough.”

Or this one:

“To continue to talk to my employees interesting: in 2006, when the Chinese first came to know that people in Chengdu, after Kai-Fu, and once I asked why not, Kai-Fu in Chengdu has also opened an Office, the Land of Abundance Well, beauty is also good to eat more than the work of engineers passion will be greatly improved. Kai-Fu said that you all play happy, I will not happy again.”

To be fair, Chinese is not an easy language to learn, let alone translate, but you have to admit the Google Translate service’s desperate attempts to extract meaning out of the (now former) Google executive’s words are funny as hell.

The translation of the man’s blog post is better (barely), and reveals that building Google in China hasn’t exactly been a breeze and that Lee now wants to pass on his knowledge and experience to Chinese youth.

Or not.

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Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Siebel, founder of CRM vendor Siebel Systems (sold to Oracle for $5.8 billion back in 2005), was reportedly attacked and injured by an elephant in Tanzania about a month ago.

The incident is vaguely reminiscent of TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy’s recent baboon attack in Rwanda, although in Siebel’s case the consequences were a bit more severe than a psychological trauma.

The 56-year-old tech mogul told Mercury News in an interview that he and his guide was attacked by a charging elephant in the Serengeti, breaking several ribs, goring him in the left leg and crushing the right.

Fortunately, unlike Larry Ellison a couple of years ago when he set his sight on the man’s company, the elephant soon lost interest in Siebel and simply walked away from the scene.

The billionaire (estimated worth: $US 1.9 billion as of 2008) had to wait three hours before the radioed medical assistance team showed up and gave him treatment, but is now recovering from his injuries in his Woodside home and expects to make a full recovery after reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. Siebel told the Mercury News Wednesday that he doesn’t know what became of the elephant that attacked him. He added that authorities in Tanzania searched for it, but as far as he knows it was never found.

Not able to come up with a good joke using the phrasing ‘elephant in the room’, I’m just going to conclude by saying we’re all glad Siebel is ok, and we hope the same is true for the animal.

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The Gmail blog has a post up right now that’s interesting for a few reasons. First, it was posted around midnight of a Friday (this is supposed to be my no-news quiet time, Google). Second, it’s written as a chat exchange between two Google employees. And third, it has a kick-ass new Nintendo-esque theme.

Truth be told, the Nintendo-like theme (called “High Score”, undoubtedly to prevent any trademark lawsuits), makes Gmail nearly impossible to read — at least at night, when the background is all black (below). But it’s awesome having a Mario-esque backdrop and Space Invader-like guys are your buddy chat indicators.

There are three other new themes as well (the first Gmail has launched since themes launched in November). They are: “Orcas Island”, “Turf”, and “Random”. The first two are rather ho-hum compared to High Score. The random one is kind of cool if you like change, which, as I just explained, I do.

This still isn’t quite as good as FriendFeed’s interactive Duck Hunt theme, but it’s close.

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There are two types of people in the world: Those that hate change, and those that embrace it. I tend to fall into the latter category. And that’s why OS X Snow Leopard is an odd product for me.

On one hand, I like the idea that Apple has decided to stick with something that is working so well (OS X Leopard), and make it lighter, faster and all-around better. On the other, it’s fairly hard to tell that you’re actually using something that is any different from the previous version. Yes, there are many little, subtle changes all over, but aside from maybe Quicktime X, there is nothing that immediately strikes you as being different. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a little disappointing to me.

New Spots?

OS X Leopard (again, the previous version) has been great, but as I said, I like change. I had been hoping for Apple to present me with something a little different after a couple years of Leopard. Instead, within a day of installing Snow Leopard, I found myself moving my dock from the bottom of my screen to the left-hand side, just to make me feel as if something had changed. This, of course, is something anyone can do in Leopard as well, but I’ve always been a bottom dock kind of guy — now I’m a left dock kind of guy, simply out of the need to make Snow Leopard feel different.

Obviously, Apple has known for a while that Snow Leopard really wouldn’t aesthetically be all that different from Leopard. While all the previous versions of OS X have had different big cat nicknames, 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is just a a different type of 10.5 (Leopard). And it’s been bracing both users and developers for the past year that Snow Leopard would not be a complete overhaul of the system, but rather a refinement of it.

And nothing speaks more to that than the price: $29. Given the amount of time (and presumably, the amount of work) put into it, it would seem that Apple would have every right to charge full price for Snow Leopard — something along the lines of $129. But Apple undoubtedly realized that without any major new consumer-facing functionality or aesthetic changes, it would be foolish to try and charge that much. Plenty of users are noting that Snow Leopard doesn’t feel all that much different, but the rationale behind getting it always seems to come back to: “But it’s only $29.”

Smart move, Apple.

Microsoft

My initial thought was that if Microsoft launched an OS update that looked and felt basically the same as the previous version, users would be up in arms much more than they are with Snow Leopard. But then I remembered that they’ve done this in the past also, it was called Windows 98.

Windows 98 really wasn’t all that different from Windows 95 from an end-user perspective, it was more of a fine-tuning of the system. Snow Leopard would seem to be Apple’s Windows 98. And if that’s the case, Apple would undoubtedly be happy as plenty of users consider Windows 98 to be a high point for Windows (well, Windows 98 SE, anyway).

But even Windows 98 came with a little cheat: Microsoft Plus. While not all versions had it, the add-on (which also was available for Windows 95, but different) added some themes and other front-end changes to Windows 98 to make it look different than the standard Windows 95 look-and-feel users may have been bored with.

Marble

And that’s why it’s surprising that Apple didn’t do something similar. At one point, it would seem that they intended to, by giving all OS X apps a new coat of paint, codenamed “Marble.” Basically, Marble was thought to be a darker version of the Brushed Metal look that OS X currently has. You can see what it may look like in certain Apple-made applications already in OS X, like Quicktime X, and parts of iPhoto and iTunes (the dark scroll bars).

So if Apple has somewhat implemented what seems to be part of it, why not go all Marble in Snow Leopard and give the users something new to look at? I’m not sure. Maybe they thought it was too dark, or maybe they’re saving it for OS X 10.7. But it’s a bit odd that the UI of the operating system is so fragmented. Especially when a unification could have quieted some of the front-end complaints.

Calamine Lotion

None of this is to say that Snow Leopard isn’t good. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now (the developer builds and now the final version), and aside from some frustrating bugs with WiFi and MobileMe, I like all of the small changes that Apple made. But again, from a user’s perspective, they’re small changes. We may see some fruits of the under-the-hood labor (64-bit and OpenCL) in the months and years to come, but right now, that’s a hard sell.

Don Draper has a great line in the first season of Mad Men, “The most important idea in advertising is ‘new’. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.” Apple created that itch by announcing a new OS, but I’m not sure that Snow Leopard is the calamine lotion that everyone was looking for. And Apple has taken a risk of sorts by releasing it this way. Especially on the verge of a major Windows overhaul with Windows 7 (which is to say, the version of Vista as it should be been made the first time).

As blogger Jason Kottke puts it, “People want to feel, emotionally speaking, that their money is well-spent and impeccable branding, funny commercials, and the sense of belonging to a hip lifestyle that Apple tries to engender in its customers can only go so far.”

It’s human nature (or at least consumer nature) to want something to seem new when you buy it; to make it seem like the money was spent on something tangible. You can completely re-do the inner workings of a piece of software, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t look any different, to most consumers, it might as well not be. Snow Leopard looks like Leopard, therefore, to many, it might as well be Leopard.

All that said, it is only $29.

[photos: flickr/kessiye, flickr/thenandagain and AMC]

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It was only three days ago that I wrote about the almost hopeless challenge of web security, specifically around new vectors with cross-site scripting attacks. Today came news that an XSS vulnerability had been found in the RubyOnRails development framework - and that applications built on the framework, such as Twitter and Basecamp, were vulnerable to XSS attacks. The vulnerability was discovered by Brian Masterbrook. He probed Twitter with some Unicode characters and found it vulnerable, tried the same thing on Basecamp and found it vulnerable, and then deduced that it must be a problem with RubyOnRails. He has an excellent and detailed write-up on his site about the process he went through. If you are running RubyOnRails anywhere, stop now and read his post as well as the security notice from the Rails developers and get your servers updated (the patch is in the notice, it will be in the release branch 'today or tomorrow').

• YUI Library: Rich Text Editor
  It is easy to overlook the YUI library, which would be a shame - it can be very useful!
• Daily Kos: State of the Nation
  Interesting take on health insurance. Why are people so scared of this?
• Athterisk: a symbol for atheism

Joe Stump is at it again. But this time, with something on the funnier side. Stump’s latest project is called Take Me to the Internets. Take Me to the Internets [iTunes link] is an iPhone application that focuses your laughter into specific categories. Each time you want a new laugh, you just shake your iPhone, and a new joke comes up. Once you find a joke you like, you can easily share funny links with your friends right from your iPhone/iPod Touch on Twitter or Facebook.

There are eight categories of jokes; quotes, comics, sexy time, photos, geeky, jokes, stories and forum posts. Once you find a category that you like, you click to find numerous laughs that are aggregated from sites that people think are funny. If they think a site is funny, all you do is use the bookmarklet, and it gets added to the queue of sites. Sites are then added and moderated by Stump and a few others.

It’s interesting to see how long it took for Stump’s latest iPhone app to get accepted to the App Store, considering his recent problems with Apple. There are numerous alternatives to an application that provides laughs, like iLaugh, iJoke, iLOL, iJoker and others.

Also, if we ever do a company logo contest, I’m sure a flying Joe Stump in a cape would get good reviews.

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The list of established players in the imaging field is a long one. Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Leica, Olympus, Pentax, Kodak... it goes on. For decades they've been fine-tuning their devices, and they continue fight fiercely over every market and price point. Certainly this has produced some excellent devices: DSLRs today offer an unprecedented value for the amateur (or pro) photographer, but I can't shake the feeling that all the big guys are spinning their wheels. After all, there are precious few real innovations in cameras these days — Casio and Fujifilm spring to mind with their innovative use of the sensor, but by and large, even the top-tier devices don't really do anything that different from the ancient one-megapixel point-and-shoots of the late 20th century. Researchers at Stanford want to change that. Although they certainly don't plan on toppling the powers that be (in fact, they're funded by them), they're tired of cameras falling under either the highly-specialized or highly-generalized categories. After all, it's all just data, right? Why not make the camera a versatile platform with a real OS, an open hardware standard, and — hell, why not — an app store?

Name any hip hop song played on the radio in the past year or so. Did any of the lyrics sound sort of warbly - as if sung by a robot? Chances are, the answer is "Yes." That's called Auto-Tune. And now there's an app for that. Smule, the masterminds behind the smash-hit apps Ocarina and Leaf Trombone, have teamed up with hip hop artist T-Pain (known for calling on Auto-Tune for just about every word he sings) and the makers of Auto-Tune, Antares, to bring the pitch-tweaking tool to the iPhone as I Am T-Pain. Oh - and it works in real time (and we've got hands-on video.)

Call for proposals -- PyCon 2010 -- <[link]>
============================== ============================== ===
Due date: October 1st, 2009
Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have
hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some
hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some

This is Part 2 of my series of posts summarizing a fascinating recent hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Early in the interview I asked Schmidt about the future of search. I brought up the “search is 90% done” misunderstanding from last summer. Said Google Vice President Marissa Mayer at the time:

Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.

Specifically I asked Schmidt “What are the hard things to be solved in search in the next ten years?”

His lengthy answer meandered around a central theme, that Google needs to move “from words to meaning.” In other words, Google needs to understand queries better, and return results that best match the real meaning of a query. “We have to get from the sort of casual use of asking, querying…to “what did you mean?”"

He then took a detour and shared a (non-serious) approach that cofounder Sergey Brin has talked about internally - direct brain implants:

Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like…But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just - if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel.

When I (again, jokingly) asked if Google was working on that product, he answered “Well, I wish we were. But we don’t exactly have all the medical clinics necessary to test brain insertion.”

But he also had a serious point. One big problem with search is a proper understanding of what exactly the user wants. And then how to pair that with exponential growth in datasets:

Okay. So to me, the question is sort of, what’s next, is really basically how far does the artificial intelligence technology go here? How many signals can we get from who you are, where you are, what you’ve been, what you’ve done and so forth to refine that querying? And at the same time, you also have this enormous expansion of data sets. I think what people are missing is that the amount of information on the Internet is growing very, very rapidly…Because it gets more open, people put more data on it and so forth and so on and that’s wonderful. Also, you have all these dynamic databases that are now - they basically publish that at web pages and again index them as well.

The long term goal of Google search, he says, is to give the user one exactly right answer to a query:

So I don’t know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we’ll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Okay, you know, the question I’ll ask today, how many Americans have - what percentage of Americans have passports?…The Google’s answer was a site, which was somebody who had attempted to answer that question and had multiple answers. It’s quite interesting actually to read…So you go to a very good definitive site. And what I’d like to do is to get to the point where we could read his site and then summarize what it says, and answer the question…Along with the citation and so forth and so on.

More interesting topics from the interview coming up soon.

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Hi All,
Today, Aptana is proud to announce that Pydev and Pydev Extensions
have become a single plugin, with all the available contents open
source (and freely available for anyone) in the 1.5.0 release (it's
the same as 1.4.8 but with all the code open source).
With that, Aptana believes in providing a better service and growth

Creately, an online diagramming and design application launched by Cinergix and showcased at TechCrunch50’s Demopit in 2008, is unveiling its online tool to the greater public (the startup has been in private beta). Creately lets anyone create create and collaborate on flow charts, wireframes, network diagrams, sitemaps and more within its site.

The key to Creately’s application is that manages to harness the abilities and tools that traditional design and graphics software offer, but packages this functionality in an easy to use application that allows for collaboration between users.

The design features are varied but relatively easy to use and intuitive. For example, Contextual Toolbars appear when you click on any object on the drawing canvas and depending on the object and its size will offer all the commonly used operations within the toolbar. Collaboration is another crucial part to the design process, says co-founder Charanjit Singh, so the startup built in commenting, sharing, publishing, embedding and the ability to publish directly to Twitter. Plus, many of its offerings are free to use.

With this public launch, Creately is also unveiling its pricing model and monetization strategy. Creately will offer a free plan that lets users makes and unlimited amount of public diagrams that can are published on Creately and visible to anyone. Free customers are restricted to a maximum of 5 collaborators and all diagrams will be published with the Creately logo. Diagrams can also be embedded and shared. The paid version will offer an unlimited amount of privately-hosted diagrams that will not have the Creately logo. But it’s unclear how much Creately’s paid version will cost and we’ve contacted the company for further explanation.

Microsoft offers a design program, Visio, that’s has similar functionality to Creately but is more complicated to use and is not web-based.

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This episode of Python411 is an interview with Sven Passig about his creation of a professional B2B app using IronPython and Silverlight on Mono and the Mac.

Good news for Android developers: Google has just posted a video of the upcoming refresh for its Android Market, the online store that allows users to download new software to their Android phones. And the changes are very promising.

According to the understated Android blog post, developers will be able to include screenshots, promotional icons, and descriptions for their applications. The UI for the store, which we caught a glimpse of in some leaked photos earlier this week, is also much more polished and user friendly. In other words, the store will now more closely resemble the iPhone’s App Store, which is not a bad thing.

Another important change is a bigger emphasis on paid applications, with a ‘Paid’ button prominently appearing at the top of the screen whenever you begin browsing though a category (paid apps are available using the current version of Android Market, but they’re much harder to find). Other additions to the store will include new sub-categories for themes, comics, health, and sports.

The news is timely. Three days ago we wrote about the lackluster sales figures that were coming out of the Android Market, which pale in comparision to those coming from the App Store — top developers for the iPhone are making thousands a day, while a top Android developer isn’t even breaking $100.

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Today, we're really pleased to launch Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance.

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.

For example, the Google Luxuries Index tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.


The Auto-Buyers Index is also interesting, especially the dramatic 40% increase correlated with the launch of the Cash for Clunkers program in the U.S.:


These charts let you easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to Google Trends. And the data for these indexes are available for download — so you can use it with your own models.

Read more about this on the Google Finance Blog, and be sure to check out the Google Research Blog for info on Hal's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic activities.

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Ayan Mandal, Product Manager Google Finance

Hi all,
I'm proud to announce the release of Sphinx 0.6.3, which is a
bugfix-only release in the 0.6 series.
What is it?
===========
Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful
documentation for Python projects (or other documents consisting of
multiple reStructuredText source files).

Parallel Performance Tuning for Haskell. Don Jones Jr., Simon Marlow, and Satnam Singh.

Parallel Haskell programming has entered the mainstream with support now included in GHC for multiple parallel programming models, along with multicore execution support in the runtime. However, tuning programs for parallelism is still something of a black art. Without much in the way of feedback provided by the runtime system, it is a matter of trial and error combined with experience to achieve good parallel speedups. This paper describes an early prototype of a parallel profiling system for multicore programming with GHC. The system comprises three parts: fast event tracing in the runtime, a Haskell library for reading the resulting trace files, and a number of tools built on this library for presenting the information to the programmer. We focus on one tool in particular, a graphical timeline browser called ThreadScope. The paper illustrates the use of ThreadScope through a number of case studies, and describes some useful methodologies for parallelizing Haskell programs.

Last year, Google rolled out forms that link into Google Doc’s spreadsheets, providing elementary database-style form support for its online office suite. Forms basically let you add data to a spreadsheet without having to enter it directly into the spreadsheet itself, or even having to log in because you can add the data through a survey.

Today, Google is upgrading its Forms tool in Google Docs, adding a number of new features. Forms is basically a way to conduct a survey, with responses added automatically to a spreadsheet. Users now have a more compact, grid-like form in which to collect data. They can now quickly gather responses for a group of similar questions by simply labeling a few columns and creating as many rows as they like.

Summary charts also have clearer formatting of statistics and now support right-to-left text input, helping out those users whose written languages go from right-to-left. Developers can also integrate forms with their own applications and pre-populate a form with data.

Since its launch, Google forms has been an easy and accessible way to collect large amounts of data. Of course, the obvious use for forms is for surveys where you are collecting a massive amount of data and then need to make sense of it. You can either embed surveys into a blog post or site or you can share a link to the survey. Any responses are collected in a spreadsheet.

These new features make forms a little bit more user-friendly and attractive. Forms aren’t the most popular Google app out there, but I’m sure to try them out the next time I post a survey on TechCrunch, instead of using SurveyMonkey or another survey application. I actually created a survey (see below) but my one complaint is that it doesn’t show respondents the results, or at least if it does, it is hard to figure out and is not an automatic function.

Loading…

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Back in July, we were at the event where PayPal announced its new flexible payments API. There, they showed off this pretty neat video of their vision of a PayPal Payments-enabled future. So this video is a few weeks old, but it’s making the rounds on Twitter again today, and it’s pretty cool, so we figured we’d post it.

Basically, this is PayPal’s vision for the future of payments. It reminds quite a bit of Mastercard’s “Priceless” commercials, but with a cool tech angle.

I want to be able to do everything this video is promising. Will that happen by the time the platform opens up on November 3rd? Nope. Will it happen anytime soon? Nope. But hopefully visions like this will inspire people to do cool things.

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For millions of students across the country summer is coming to a close, and CampusBuddy, a Facebook application and web portal that focuses on school courses and grades, is looking to capitalize on the Back-To-School rush. Today the site is launching a totally revamped homepage and Facebook application, a new text book search engine, and a number of new social features that it hopes will better connect students with their classmates. CampusBuddy is also adopting a freemium model today, with hopes of converting its rapidly growing base of users into paying customers.

We last covered CampusBuddy last fall, when the site launched to offer reports on grades handed out by professors at hundreds of universities across the country, which students can use to help figure out which classes they want to take. Since then, the site has been making some strong progress: in addition to the grade reports it’s also focusing on helping prospective students connect with colleges as they leave high school, and it’s also focusing more on helping students connect with eachother. It was also chosen as a Facebook Verified App, which CEO Michael Moradian says has been helpful in reaching new students — the company’s Facebook application has jumped from around 30,000 active users during the last school year to over 60,000 active users today.

Back in the old days of Facebook, when the site still revolved around college students, it offered a feature called “Courses” that allowed students to publicly display which courses they were taking. The app could be quite useful, but it was also limited, with plenty of room for improvement. Rather than continue to build out its own app, Facebook dropped its native Courses and left it up to developers to build their own applications.

CampusBuddy is one of the leading apps vying to take over this role, and today’s update may help in that race. The site’s Facebook application will now offer a Wall for every course at every University in its system, essentially giving students a central place to hold their course-specific discussions, which could prove very useful. But in order to participate or even see these conversations students will have had to install the CampusBuddy app, and the app’s 60,000 users is still only a drop in the bucket compared to the number of students on Facebook.

That said, if CampusBuddy can become the de facto college app on the site, its user-base could snowball. Moradian is optimistic about this possibility, and says that CampusBuddy is the most popular application on Facebook to let students search through a database of courses at their school, explaining that while there are some other popular apps that allow users to enter the courses they’re taking, they’re all user submitted which can result in duplicate entries. The CampusBuddy app itself is quite robust, featuring areas for general discussions, schedules, and more — I would have much rather used something like this than the old Facebook Courses app during my school days. Now it just needs a wider student community to embrace it.

Also worth noting: CampusBuddy is now switching to a freemium model. Up until now the startup has offered its database of grades free of charge — now it will begin charging a small fee for users to access the grades and related analysis as part of its ‘Academic Edge’ package. Access costs $4.99 for three months or $8.99 for a year (it grows cheaper if you buy multiple years at a time). Students likely won’t be too pleased with the change, but competitors like MyEdu (formerly PickaProf) have had freemium models for some time now, so this isn’t particularly surprising.

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Want to keep track of Yankees games, Bristol Rugby matches, or the schedule of the Taiwan Beer team (for all of you fans of the Taiwanese Super Basketball League out there)? Now you can subscribe to the schedules of your favorite professional sports teams on Google Calendar. Just click on “Add other calendars” in the left-hand column and browse “interesting calendars.”

Google just added sports calendars for football, baseball, basketball, rugby, hockey and soccer. It also released a few other features today, including the ability to add birthday reminders for your contacts. If you have their birthdays in Gmail contacts or it is in their Google profiles (we all have one of those, right), then it will automatically populate your calendar with their birthdays.

Google Calendar Labs also has two new features. Meetings that are scheduled on a repeated basis can be dimmed in the calendar. Those weekly staff meetings are so much background noise anyway. And now any Google Gadget can be added to your calendar.

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Google has launched a new area of Google Finance called “Google Domestic Trends.” Basically, it allows you to look at various sectors of the U.S. economy based on how they are performing in Google’s search index. The idea is that the volume of searches for related queries to a specific segment may “provide unique economic insight,” says Google.

That’s an interesting idea, but does is it actually smart to invest based on one search engine’s data? Google has a few compelling examples for why it could be.

Take a look at the retail sales chart below for the past couple of years. As you can see, the results predicted with the Google Retail Index are clearly closer then the predictions made without it. For a while it looks like the data is only marginally closer, but starting in 2009, it’s clear that the data is much closer to the actual results.

This isn’t the first time Google has wondered if its search index could predict economic activity. Back in April, it wrote about it on its research blog. But it’s interesting now that it clearly feels comfortable enough with the results of the data that it’s featuring it on its Finance site.

The actual data Google provides is rather open-ended. For each of the sectors, you can see the overall volume trends and compare it with the Dow Jones, S&P 500, the Nasdaq, or any ticker symbol, but it’s not as easy to compare it to actual trends like Google does in the graph above. Basically, it is putting the information it has out there, and you have to do your own homework with it.

Google continues to revamp its Finance site to make it more useful compared to its more widely-used competitors. Data is the key for all of this, so it’s probably a good idea to at least put it out there and see if investors are interested in seeing this. Other companies like StockTwits are already proving that there’s an appetite for some less than conventional means of investing.

As Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street, “The most valuable commodity I know of is information.”

[photo: flickr/artemuestra]

[Thanks Michael for reminding us of the Gekko quote]

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Sometimes I actually feel sorry for old media. Blogs are taking all the page views and don’t have the massive cost overhead of newspapers and magazines. AOL is gobbling up magazine and other media writers by the hundreds.

And today I see this article talking about Google News Spotlight, which focuses on that supposedly last bastion of old media - investigative journalism. The stuff that’s “too hard” for blogs to do. But in a world where old media can’t keep up with breaking news, presumably longer investigative articles can be their safe place:

The Spotlight section of Google News is updated periodically with news and in-depth pieces of lasting value. These stories, which are automatically selected by our computer algorithms, include investigative journalism, opinion pieces, special-interest articles, and other stories of enduring appeal.

And what’s a good example of a special-interest article with “enduring appeal?” The Onion, a satire website which is currently the top story on Spotlight. This article beats out everything else that old media investigative journalism can muster right now.

It’s just too bad Google News isn’t linking to the Daily Show yet.

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After months of speculation (and frustration) MMS for the iPhone 3G and 3G S is officially arriving on September 25, AT&T has confirmed. This is a full 3 days after summer officially ends (AT&T’s original deadline was “late summer”) as our own MG pointed out earlier today, but like a lot of things with Apple/AT&T, better late than never.

AT&T posted the following comments on its Facebook page:

An Update on iPhone MMS for our Mobility Customers

We know many of our iPhone customers are eager for an update on our rollout schedule for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). We’ve been working for the past several months to prepare our systems and network to ensure the best possible experience with MMS when it launches – and that launch date is: September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS customers. MMS will be enabled through a software update on that day.

We know that iPhone users will embrace MMS. The unique capabilities and high usage of the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities required us to work on our network MMS architecture to carry the expected record volumes of MMS traffic and ensure an excellent experience from Day One. We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end.

We’re riding the leading edge of smartphone growth that’s resulted in an explosion of traffic over the AT&T network. Wireless use on our network has grown an average of 350 percent year-over-year for the past two years, and is projected to continue at a rapid pace in 2009 and beyond. The volume of smartphone data traffic the AT&T network is handling is unmatched in the wireless industry. We want you to know that we’re working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years to come.

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Right about now I should be leaving for the airport. In some 24 hours I’d be landing in Sao Paulo, picked up by my driver for the next two weeks and embarking on a jam-packed agenda, meeting with scores of South American startups and entrepreneurs.

This was to be the latest in my series of travels for my book-in-progress about entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Brazil was the one place that no one in the Valley was pushing me to visit. In fact, it was the one place my husband had asked me not to visit, having heard many reports of kidnapping and violence. But I was resolutely convinced there was a world of exciting companies and stories and had been looking forward to the trip for months. In fact, I’d spent about four months studying Portuguese and planning the trip.

I’m not on getting on that plane today though. Entrepreneurs who’d hoped to be written up on TechCrunch: Blame your government.

American citizens have to have visas to get into Brazil, and my visa was “guaranteed” to get to me by last Friday, the day before my original flight was supposed to leave. That didn’t happen and I was frustrated, but travel in emerging markets is never easy. So I agreed to push the trip back a week and absorb nearly $1,000 in extra costs associated with that, not to mention huge disruption to my schedule. (Bear in mind, this isn’t TechCrunch money. I am self-funding research for this book and have to closely watch every dime.) All I asked was when I would absolutely get the visa by so I wouldn’t have to reschedule things again. I was told yesterday, September 2. Guess what? No visa.

I’m now told that it is definitely getting here Friday. Unfortunately, I have no reason to actually believe that’s true at this point. I can’t push my schedule back any more and comply with existing trips in September, October and November and frankly, having now spent thousands of dollars on a trip that’s not happening, I wasn’t interested in throwing more good money after bad. As a result, my trip to Brazil is canceled. I have paid the fees to switch the plane ticket to one to China in October.

I paid an expediting service hundreds of dollars to ensure I’d be getting this visa, and clearly they’ve been getting an earful from me over the last week. If not for a phone call from the owner this morning finally agreeing to waive the fees I paid them, this post would largely be skewering them. But she assures me no one is getting into Brazil and her week has been even worse than mine. Apparently, the Brazilian government decided to switch to a new computer system for all of its consulate offices and only sent two computers to each office, and not the adequate software to process everything. So everyone has been in a holding pattern. Some consulates aren’t promising any visas before 25 days; others won’t even take an appointment with prospective travelers unless they show documents showing travel in the next 15 days. In fact my visa is the first one the processing firm will get back—that is, if they actually do get it today as promised. They’ve not only been screamed at by me, but loads of business travelers—and even a coach for a national soccer team who can’t get in the country.

It’s particularly ironic given that the Brazilian government has recently hired the PR firm Fleishman Hillard to go around talking up its commitment to IT and entrepreneurship. You want foreign investment and attention, Brazil? Here’s an idea: LET PEOPLE ENTER THE DAMN COUNTRY. You want to show your IT prowess? How about outfitting your consulates with computer systems that work? Or maybe rolling it out slowly so other offices could handle the overflow. Or training people on it first.

The country should be embarrassed, and its businesses should be furious. I’m going to aim to try this whole Brazil thing again in December or January. It’s not the entrepreneurs’ or our readers’ fault this happened, and I still believe there are great stories in Brazil that I want to report. But when you’re harder to get into than China, it doesn’t bode well for foreign investment, Brazil.

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AppJet’s EtherPad, the real-time Google Docs-like wiki tool that was recently upgraded to become more collaborative, has launched an uber-cool tool that definitely worth a look. Called the “Time-Slider,” the feature lets you see the complete history of a document’s evolution.

Here’s how it works. EtherPad keeps track of all your typing in realtime. At any time during the course of typing a document on EtherPad, you can click on the “Time-Slider” button that will play an animation of your document to see how it evolved over time. The tool also features a timeline where you can click into any stage of the document and see the evolution from that point.

You can also create “bookmark” in the document’s timeline to mark certain points during the evolution of document that you’d like to go back to. Time-slider is a really interesting tool, if only for the nifty screencast of your document’s evolution. But seriously, when it comes to collaboration between several people, the time-slider could be useful to see how a particular document took form.

You can also test out EtherPad’s new tool here, when the startup captured Paul Graham writing an essay on startups.

EtherPad was the brainchild of former Googlers (who founded online programming tool and Y Combinator funded AppJet) who wanted a real-time, yet group oriented way to collaborate on notes and documents. Thus, EtherPad was born. EtherPad continues to upgrade its product with compelling features and innovations. The startup recently partnered with video-chat startup TokBox to offer document collaboration.

And earlier this summer, EtherPad got a user interface makeover and added the ability to import and export Word, PDF, Plain Text and HTML documents. Appjet made writing a document in EtherPad more like writing out notes in Word or Google Docs, adding rich text formatting, including bold, underline, italics and strikethrough commands to the wiki. And organization of notes within a document became a little better with the ability to add bullet points. EtherPad’s tools and functionality could just give Google Docs a run for its money.

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Here is what's been happening lately:

New software-specific documentation

We've started writing some new documentation about specific software. This new documentation will eventually replace and surpass all of our knowledge base. The two latest guides that we wrote are:

• a Python guide, available at http://docs.webfaction.com/software/python.html
• a Django guide, available at http://docs.webfaction.com/software/django.html

WSGI SSL middleware no longer needed

Our mod_wsgi and django on mod_wsgi apps now come with the following line in their apache configuration:

SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-SSL on HTTPS=1

This means that mod_wsgi will set the right wsgi.url_scheme, removing the need for SSL middlewares such as http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/240/

Support for email extensions

Email extensions are now fully supported. This means that you can configure an email such as email@domain.com in the control panel and people can send emails to email+anything@domain.com and it'll work.

Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser.

Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more. (Developers can get more details here).

The mobile Web is already a big deal for Facebook. Across all of its mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, etc), its mobile Website, and SMS, a full 65 million members reach Facebook via mobile devices every month. That comes to 26 percent of the 250 million total active members that Facebook puts out as its official number, or 18 percent of the 370 million monthly worldwide uniques that comScore measures.

Either way it is a significant and fast growing chunk of overall Facebook usage—between a fifth and a quarter. Back in December, only 20 million people were getting to Facebook via mobile devices.

http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php

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The iPhone 3G S launched a few months ago, but AT&T users haven't been able to take advantage of a few much vaunted (and much needed) features as yet: MMS, Bluetooth file-sharing, and tethering are the Big Three. This, of course, despite the fact that AT&T is the “flagship” carrier! But never mind all that, because today we have some good news in the way of this latest bit of gossip: starting with iPhone OS 3.1, AT&T users will, in fact, be able to use MMS and Bluetooth file-sharing. Welcome to 2006, iPhone owners!

Websites large and small are quickly learning that a sure way to make something go viral is to make it easy to share on Facebook and Twitter. Why should search results be any different? In fact, the ability to share a result via Twitter or social networks is quickly becoming a standard feature of many real-time search engines.

Microsoft’s Bing might soon add its own way to share search results called “Bing and Ping.” The feature is about to enter limited beta testing and will show up under certain result types such as sports scores or flight information. There will be small links at the bottom allowing you to share that result via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

Most of the time, searching is a solitary activity. But there are times when you come across something worth sharing, especially if it is presented as more than just a link. Bing tries to compile information for different search categories in their own self-contained boxes. These are certainlyshareable, especially when you are trying to prove a point, win an argument, or just rub your friends’ noses in it when their favorite team loses.

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"The marijuana is grown in the middle of some very respectable Seattle suburbs, such as Renton."

This is a funny sentence if you're a longtime resident of the greater Seattle area, because Renton has historically been a working-class town. (Here's Almost Live's parody of South King County to give you an idea of what Renton is up against.)

The city is working to change its reputation. I wish them luck.

Sad but true: Once you document a file format, it becomes a de facto API.

The Windows 95 team learned this the hard way when they set out to replace Program Manager with Explorer. Not only were the settings in the PROGMAN.INI file documented, so too was the binary file format of *.GRP files. The binary file format was included for diagnostic purposes: If you have a corrupted GRP file, you can use the binary file format documentation to try to recover what you can out of it.

But many people treated this documentation not as a FYI, but as a backdoor API. Instead of using the formal DDE interface for creating program groups and icons, they just directly edited the PROGMAN.INI file and the applicable GRP files to get the icons and groups they wanted.

Oh wait, and then you need to reboot in order for the backdoor API to take effect, because all you did was modify the on-disk files, not the in-memory copy held by PROGMAN.EXE.

Of course, when Windows 95 replaced Program Manager with Explorer, these programs found themselves modifying the data files of a program that no longer was running. Special code had to be added to Explorer to read settings from PROGMAN.INI and even detect that a new GRP file was added and convert it into shortcuts on the Start menu.

I wouldn't be surprised if that code is still lying around, just in case somebody pulls out an old application from 1994 and installs it.

With the rise of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as git and Mercurial, I've seen more conversations about strategies for branching and merging and how they fit in with Continuous Integration (CI). There's a bit of confusion here, particularly on the practice of feature branching and how it fits in with CI.

Simple (isolated) Feature Branch

The basic idea of a feature branch is that when you start work on a feature (or story if you prefer that term) you take a branch of the repository to work on that feature. In a DVCS, you'll do this in your personal repository, but the same kind of thing works in a centralized VCS too.

I'm going to illustrate this with a series of diagrams. I have a shared project mainline, colored blue, and two developers, colored purple and green (since the developers names are Reverend Green and Professor Plum).

I'm using labeled colored boxes (eg P1 and P2) to represent local commits on the branch. Arrows between branches represent merges between branches, the boxes are colored orange to make them stand out. In this case there are updates, say a couple of bug-fixes, applied to the mainline (presumably by Mrs Peacock). When these happen our developers merge them into their work. To give this a sense of time, I'll assume we're looking at a few days work here, with each developer committing to their local branch roughly once a day.

In order to ensure things are working properly, they can run builds and tests on their branch. Indeed for this article I'll assume that each commit and merge comes with an automated build and test on the branch it's on.

The advantage of feature branching is that each developer can work on their own feature and be isolated from changes going on elsewhere. They can pull in changes from the mainline at their own pace, ensuring they don't break the flow of their feature. Furthermore it allows the team to choose its features for release. If Reverend Green takes too long, we can release with just Professor Plum's changes. Or we may want to delay Professor Plum's feature, perhaps because we are uncertain that the feature works the way we want to release it. In this case we just tell the professor to not merge his changes into mainline until we are ready for the feature. This is called cherry-picking, the team decides which features to merge in before release.

Attractive though that picture looks, there can be trouble ahead.

Although our developers can develop their features in isolation, at some point their work does have to be integrated. In this case Professor Plum easily updates the mainline with his own changes. There's no merge here because he's already incorporated the mainline changes into his own branch (there will be a build). Things are however not so simple for Reverend Green, he needs to merge all of his changes (G1-6) with all of Professor Plum's (P1-5).

(At this point many users of DVCSs may feel I'm missing something as this is a simple, perhaps simplistic view of feature branching. I'll get to a more involved scheme later.)

I've made this a big merge box as it's a scary merge. It may be just fine, the developers may have been working on completely separate parts of the code base with no interaction, in which case the merge will go smoothly. But they may be working on bits that do interact, in which case here lye dragons.

The dragons can come in many forms, and tooling can help slay some of them. The most of obvious dragon is the complexity of merging the source code and dealing with conflicts as developers edit the same files. Modern DVCSs actually handle this rather well, indeed somewhat magically. Git has quite the reputation for dealing with complicated merges. So much so that the textual issues of merging are much better than they used to be - indeed I'll go so far as to discount textual conflicts for the purposes of this article.

The problem I worry more about is a semantic conflict. A simple example of this is that if Professor Plum changes the name of a method that Reverend Green's code calls. Refactoring tools allow you to rename a method safely, but only on your code base. So if G1-6 contain new code that calls foo, Professor Plum can't tell in his code base as he doesn't have it. You only find out on the big merge.

A function rename is a relatively obvious case of a semantic conflict. In practice they can be much more subtle. Tests are the key to discovering them, but the more code there is to merge the more likely you'll have conflicts and the harder it is to fix them. It's the risk of conflicts, particularly semantic conflicts, that make big merges scary.

This fear of big merges also acts as a deterrent to refactoring. Keeping code clean is constant effort, to do it well it requires everyone to keep an eye out for cruft and fix it wherever they see it. However this kind of refactoring on a feature branch is awkward because it makes the Big Scary Merge worse. The result we see is that teams using feature branches shy away from refactoring which leads to uglier code bases.

Continuous Integration

It's these problems that Continuous Integration was designed to solve. With Continuous Integration my diagram looks like this.

There's a lot more merging going on here, but merging is one of those things that's much easier to do frequently and small rather than rarely and large. As a result if Professor Plum is changing some code that Reverend Green relies on, the Reverend will find it early, such as when he merges in P1-2. At that point he's only got to modify G1-2 to work with the changes, rather than G1-6.

CI is effective at removing the problem of big merges, but it's also a vital communication mechanism. In this scenario the potential conflict will actually appear when Professor Plum merges G1 and realizes that Reverend Green is actively building on Plum's libraries. At this point Professor Plum can go and find Reverend Green and they can discuss how their two features interact. It may be that Professor Plum's feature requires some changes that don't mesh well with Reverend Green's changes. By looking at both their features they can come up with a better design that affects both their work-streams. With the isolated feature branches our developers don't discover this till late, probably too late to do much about it. Communication is one of the key factors in software development and one of CI's most important features is that it facilitates human communication.

It's important to note that, most of the time, feature branching like this is a different approach to CI. One of the principles of CI is that everyone commits to the mainline every day. So unless feature branches only last less than a day, running a feature branch is a different animal to CI. I've heard people say they are doing CI because they are running builds, perhaps using a CI server, on every branch with every commit. That's continuous building, and a Good Thing, but there's no integration, so it's not CI.

Promiscuous Integration

Earlier I said parenthetically that there are other ways of doing feature branching. Say Professor Plum and Reverend Green take tea together early in the cycle. While chatting they discover they are working on features that interact. At this point they may choose to integrate with each other directly, like this.

With this approach they only push to the mainline at the end, as before. But they merge frequently with each other, so this avoids the Big Scary Merge. The point here is that the primary issue with the isolated feature branching scheme is its isolation. When you isolate the feature branches, there is a risk of a nasty conflict growing without you realizing it. Then the isolation is an illusion, and will be shattered painfully sooner or later.

So is this more ad-hoc integration a form of CI or a different animal entirely? I think it is a different animal, again a key point of CI is everyone integrates to the mainline every day. Integrating across feature branches, which I shall call promiscuous integration (PI), doesn't involve or even need a mainline. I think this difference is important.

Promiscuous Integration vs Continuous Integration

So if it's different is PI better than CI, or more realistically under what circumstances is PI better than CI?

With CI, you lose the ability to use the VCS to do cherry picking. Every developer is touching mainline, so all features grow in the mainline. With CI, the mainline must always be healthy, so in theory (and often in practice) you can safely release after any commit. Having a half built feature or a feature you'd rather not release yet won't damage the other functionality of the software, but may require some masking if you don't want it to be visible in the user-interface. This can be as simple as not including a menu item in the UI to trigger the feature.

PI can provide some middle ground here. It allows Reverend Green the choice of when to incorporate Professor Plum's changes. If Professor Plum makes some core API changes in P2, then Reverend Green can import P1-2 but leave the others until Professor Plum's feature is put onto the release.

One worry with all this picking and choosing is that PI makes it really hard to keep track of who has what in their branch. In practice, it seems tooling pretty much solves this problem. DVCSs keep a clear track of changes and their origins and can figure out that when Professor Plum pulls G3 he already has G2 but doesn't have B2. I may have made mistakes drawing the diagram by hand, but tools do keep track of these things well.

On the whole, however, I don't think cherry-picking with the VCS is a good idea.

I much prefer designing the software in such a way that makes it easy to enable or disable features through configuration changes. My colleague Paul Hammant calls this Branch by Abstraction. This requires you to put some thought into what needs to be modularized and how to control that variation, but we've found the result to be far less messy that relying on the VCS.

The main thing that makes me nervous about PI is the influence on human communication. With CI the mainline acts as a communication point. Even if Professor Plum and Reverend Green never talk, they will discover the nascent conflict - within a day of it forming. With PI they have to notice they are working on interacting code. An up-to-date mainline also makes it easy for someone to be sure they are integrating with everyone, they don't have to poke around to find out who is doing what - so less chance of some changes being hidden until a late integration.

PI arose out of open-source work, and it could be that the less intensive tempo of open-source could be a factor here. In a full time job, you work several hours a day on a project. This makes it easier for features to be worked in priority. With an open source project people often put in a hour here, and the next hour a few days later. A feature may take one developer quite a while to complete while other developers with more time are able to get features into a releasable state earlier. In this situation cherry picking can be more important.

It's important to realize that the tools you use are largely independent of the integration strategy you use. Although many people associate DVCSs with feature branching, they can be used with CI. All you need to do is mark one branch on one repository as the mainline. If everyone pulls and pushes to that every day, then you have a CI mainline. Indeed with a disciplined team, I would usually prefer to use a DVCS on a CI project than a centralized one. With a less disciplined team I would worry that a DVCS would nudge people towards long lived branches, while a centralized VCS and a reluctance to branch nudges them towards frequent mainline commits. Paul Hammant may be right: "I wonder though, if a team should not be adept with trunk-based development before they move to distributed."

Twitter keeps on growing like a weed, and there seems to be no stopping the much-hyped, heavily scrutinized Silicon Valley startup in its quest to turn its popular micro-sharing service into a veritable pulse of the planet. Twitter passed 50 million unique visitors worldwide in July, according to comScore, reaching 51.6 million UVs at the end of the month. But its biggest increase in traffic Twitter saw earlier this year, when unique visitors numbers gradually increased to reach 44.5 million in June, up from 19.1 million in the beginning of March.

Note that this traffic only accounts for members who are content with using the Twitter website, and doesn’t take into account the multitude of users who log on to third-party web services or desktop clients to access their Twitter streams. Either way you look at it, Twitter’s ongoing growth is staggering.

People information search specialist Rapleaf thought it’d be interesting to run some analysis on Twitter follower trends based on data it was monitoring closely for one of its clients, and the study gives us an interesting insight into how Twitter’s huge growth between March and June have affected following patterns of some of its most active users. We already learned most people on Twitter are sheep, but does that change over time?

Rapleaf recently helped one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies identify the most influential and connected Twitter users within their customer list for a word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Part of the analysis that Rapleaf was commissioned to do involved researching how profiles of their client’s customers on Twitter changed between given periods of time, by closely analyzing the users’ following and follower count.

The company ran some numbers on their clients’ top 0.1%, top 1% and top 10% most-followed Twitter users within the company’s customer list and compared how these figures changed in nine weeks, from the beginning of March until mid-June.

Rapleaf will be releasing the numbers later today but was kind enough to give us a sneak peek.

Clearly, the catchphrase ‘the rich get rich and the poor get poorer’ is at least half true when it comes to Twitter users’ following trends. While the service’s growth understandably lifts the follower numbers of the average Twitter user along the way, there’s also an apparent popularity gap that continues to widen.

Based on the sample of 40,000 users that Raplead has analyzed - deemed active members because they have at least five followers, five friends or five updates - it seems that having lots of followers on Twitter means that you’re going to grow more popular more rapidly as the microblogging service continues to boom.

The top 0.1% of observed Twitter users climbed 275% in Twitter followers between March and June, while the top 1% increased only 146% in comparison, and the top 10% gained only 126%. Even when analyzing the median followers, the stats paint a clear picture: the top 0.1%, 1% and 10% of researched Twitter users saw their follower base grow by 78%, 65% and 59% respectively.

Could this be the Twitter Golden Ratio at work?

Looking at the difference between the popularity of the top 0.1%, the top 1%, and the top 10% during the month of June, Rapleaf’s study shows users in the top 0.1% have approximately 5 times as many followers as users in the top 1% and about 40 times as many followers as users in the top 10%. It’s unclear how many of them are spam, of course.

Also noteworthy: a user who barely makes the top 10% needs 11.4 times more followers to break into the top 1%, and nearly 55 times as many followers to enter the top 0.1%.

Wanna see how your popularity on Twitter is evolving? Check out TwitterCounter to get an idea. Not happy with what you’re seeing? Try tweeting more often.

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I've been tied up on a "special project" these past couple of evenings, so I thought it'd be fun to share this great classic. And, of course, by "project", I mean Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series and by "special" I mean "on Blu-ray." One of these days, I'll have to learn the discipline of Raymond Chen and have a few things queued up for urgent situations like these.

The Cool Cam was written by Jake Vinson and originally published on August 14th, 2007.

---

Brand G. got his start in the game industry working at MicroProse, famous for classics such as Civilization, the X-COM series, Masters of Orion, Pirates, and Dark Earth (one of my personal favorites). MicroProse was also known for its military simulation games, such as Gunship, Pacific Air War, M-1 Tank Platoon, and Falcon 4.0. Brand was brought on to work on such a simulation, European Air War.

European Air War was doomed. It was four years in development and not even close to being ready to ship. In Brand's first month at MicroProse, the whole programming team on European Air War quit, sensing that their project was on the verge of cancellation. Not only that, but everyone had grown tired enduring the stress of the weekly "why-shouldn't-we-cancel-this-project" meetings with the executives. In these meetings, they'd have to choose their words carefully when answering the executives' tough questions about the budget as well as major bugs in the system such as...

• Why are the planes flying backwards sometimes?
  Well, uhh, a little known thing about Nazi technology developed in World War I...
• Why do the wings come off the plane whenever you fire the guns?
  Uhh, err...
• Why does the plane bounce up and out of the earth's atmosphere when you crash into the ground?
  Umm, in high-speed collisions like that it's not totally unreasonable that a plane's velocity torque rotary girder viscosity...

These meetings were tough. It almost seemed as though the execs were only keeping the project alive for the sadistic pleasure they took in watching the developers squirm. And among the bugs mentioned above, there were mountains more. For instance, planes couldn't take off or land. At all. Well, you could try to land, but that would cause the bug where the plane would bounce off the ground and into outer space. So to address the issue, all missions started out mid-flight and wouldn't require (or even allow) you to land.

Another fun bug caused the enemy AI to do your work for you. A rogue enemy plane would suddenly reject his mother country and start shooting down his own teammates. That is, until his wings fell off the plane since he was firing his guns. Then he'd kamikaze his plane into the ground, which would launch the plane into outer space that the MicroProse executives probably didn't find nearly as funny as I do.

Brand would stress out about defending the game at the weekly meetings, but that didn't mean that he thought concerns about European Air War's progress were unfounded. Facing a mountain of bugs and a project ready for the chopping block, he was relieved when another developer was added to the team, effectively halving the abuse Brand would have to deal with on a weekly basis. We'll call the new developer "Tim."

Tim knew what he was getting into when he came aboard the project. He knew about the bugs, about the budget, and about the impending cancellation of the whole thing. And with the major issues, you'd figure he'd start with any one of them. Maybe the one with the wings falling off whenever guns were fired. Especially considering the game is called "European Air War." If the wings ("air") and guns ("war") come off the plane, the game title should just be reduced to "European," or perhaps "European Wingless Plane Amidst Nazi Battle Simulator." You could start up a game and watch Nazis shoot eachothers' planes down until yours crashed.

With all of the bugs he could get started on, he decided it was necessary to add a new feature instead. He developed a camera system that would focus on anything "cool" happening near the player. For instance, one plane shakes another with a delicate evasive maneuver. Or it'd mount to a bomb right as a B-17's bay was opening, following its descent onto the earth. Or it'd follow a plane being shot down, ablaze and spiraling toward the ground, engines sputtering.

The "Cool Cam" was cool. But it didn't change the fact that the game was almost completely broken. Brand wanted to confront Tim about bug priority and all of the code he was toiling away to debug, but held his tongue. No one could save the project at this point anyway.

At the next week's meeting with management, the air felt heavy. With each passing week the execs were seeing money hemorrhaged into a dying project that they'd had a full team on for four years. Tim started up the game and played carefully to avoid the obvious bugs. Getting a double whammy of tough questions ("How overbudget is this project?" and "Why shouldn't we cancel this right now?"), Tim made sure his plane was level and flying evenly and let go of the joystick and hit the cool cam button.

Brand sat there silently, watching the monitor. Tim turned toward the execs, about to stumble through an answer they probably wouldn't accept. The room was silent, save for the steady hum of the plane's engines coming out of the computer speakers. Suddenly, the camera zoomed in on an explosion, following a flaming plane barreling toward the earth, then the focus moved slightly to another plane quickly evading the flaming shell. Tim took the controls again when the execs lobbed another tough question about bugs they'd made no progress in fixing. Again, Tim leveled the plane and hit the cool cam button. And again, he didn't have to answer because everyone was fixated on the screen.

Tim's "cool cam" saved European Air War. It went from a money-leaking embarrassment to a top-tier release for MicroProse. The weekly meetings got easier, more developers were brought on, and the team managed to put together one hell of a game. It reviewed well after its 1998 release and is still a popular game for history buffs. And it probably wouldn't have been released if not for a programmer that knew what the project needed most; the cool cam.

One of the richest areas of experimentation in search right now is how to rank real-time results. For the most part, that means finding relevance in Twitter and bringing up the most important Tweets for any given keyword (see OneRiot, Collecta,Scoopler). Today, real-time search engine CrowdEye is introducing its own real-time ranking algorithm called CrowdRank. It’s supposed to be like Google’s PageRank, but for the crowd.

Right now,real-time search is Twitter search because that is the richest source of real-time data. And Twitter search is essentially a form of people search. Twitter’s own search engine simply brings back a reverse-chronological list of the most recent Tweets that match the keyword you enter.

CrowdEye does that as well because often in real-time search you just want to see what is happening at this second. But now CrowdEye will let you sort by relevance as well, rearranging results by the most influential people on Twitter. (See screenshots below)

What exactly goes into CrowdRank? CrowdEye founder Ken Moss, who previously was a search guru at Microsoft, won’t reveal all the factors. But the number of followers someone has seems to be the main one. He says:

CrowdEye Rank has many inputs, and the list will be changing over time as we work to refine the algorithm. Obviously it includes things like how many followers you have and whether you are a “verified” twitter account. Less obviously are some factors we use to penalize spammers.

Fortunately, he includes other measures of influence too, like how many times any particular message has been retweeted. Otherwise @aplusk is going to show up at the top of every search.

But now that every person on Twitter has a CrowdRank, when CrowdEye returns results, it shows an actual CrowdRank number between 1 and 100 at the bottom right of each avatar for the top Tweets in results. There is also a directory of the top CrowdRanked Twitter users, but these seem to match up closely to the list of people with the most followers (which again brings us back to to @aplusk problem).

For any given search, CrowdEye returns the top Tweets as well as the top links. Another change today is that if you sign into CrowdEye with your Twitter account, you can follow anybody who comes up in search results or retweet a message without leaving CrowdEye. CrowdEye will also now give you a personalized list of people to follow based partly on who you are already following.

This list is much better. For me it suggested my former Fortune colleague David Kirkpatrick and New York Times reporter Brad Stone (I swear, I thought I was already following you guys—no wait, that’s on Facebook). It also suggests Stocktwits (I’m not really a trader), author Tim Ferris (yes), and MC Hammer (why not?).

And most ambitious of all, CrowdEye will create a personalized homepage showing you links and Tweets tailored for you (see bottom screenshot). It shows you the most Tweeted articles from your favorite pre-selected blogs and news sites or ones which match saved queries. So instead of an empty search box, you are greeted with a bunch of recent content to explore as filtered by both your personal preferences and the collective wisdom (or idiocy) of Twitter.

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Hello!
I am proud to announce the first release of pyfsevents, a C extension
providing a Python interface to the FSEvents API.
FSEvents is an Apple framework for Mac OS X >= 10.5 allowing
monitoring of file system events on Mac OS platforms.
* URL:
[link]
* Mercurial repository:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator. Available for £180 starting October exclusively on T-Mobile, it boasts a 3.5" HVGA touchscreen display, the biggest yet on an Android handset, a 3.2-megapixel camera and a TeleNav-powered GPS (more specs below). The new device comes courtesy of Huawei, which had been rumored to be working with T-Mobile since displaying a device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. More details about the device: The phone runs on a Qualcomm's MSM7200A chipset and weighs 130g. It features a trackball and a 3.5" HVGA touchscreen display with auto-rotation. The T-Mobile Pulse also features a 3.2 mega pixel, auto-focus camera (no flash) that allows photos to be uploaded straight to the Internet, a 2GB internal memory and a micro SD card slot for storing media. The handset also offers access to corporate e-mail through the Road sync client, and boasts enhanced social networking and community features.

Laggard UK music retailer HMV is buying a 50 percent stake in the UK-based online music retailer 7Digital for $12.6 Million (£7.7 million). The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats, its white label API and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify and many major record labels.

The purchase creates a neat exit for 7Digital’s VC backers Balderton Capital and Sutton Place Managers. CEO Ben Drury told me that the VCs got a “positive return on investment” - though terms have not been disclosed. In January last year it took £4.25 million in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital. HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for “all of its existing digital operations” in the UK and Canada.

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Are you familar with happy talk?

If you're not sure whether something is happy talk, there's one sure-fire test: if you listen very closely while you're reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying "Blah blah blah blah blah...."

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.

Happy talk is the kudzu of the internet; the place is lousy with the stuff.

And then there's the visual equivalent of happy talk. Those cloying, meaningless stock photos of happy users doing ... something ... with a computer.

What is going on here? Given the beatific expressions, you'd think they were undergoing some kind of nerd rapture. Maybe they're getting a sneak preview of the singularity, I don't know.

It's unclear to me why companies (and even some individuals) think they need happy talk, stock photos of multicultural computer users, or the occasional headset hottie. Jason Cohen provides an explanation:

Even before I had a single customer, I "knew" it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a "real company." I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.

It also means adopting typical "marketing-speak," so my "About Us" page started with:

Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear's Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support.

"Leading provider?" "Data mining?" I'm not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens.

That's what you're supposed to do, right? That's what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition?

I'm not sure where we got our ideas about this stuff, but it is true that some large companies promote a kind of doublespeak "professionalism". Kathy Sierra describes her experiences at Sun:

By the time I got to Sun, using the word "cool" in a customer training document was enough to warrant an entry in your annual performance eval. And not in a good way.

I cannot count the times I heard the word "professionalism" used as justification for why we couldn't do something. But I can count the few times I heard the word "passion" used in a meeting where the goal was to get developers to adopt our newest Java technologies. What changed?

Some argue that by maintaining strict professionalism, we can get the more conservative, professional clients and thus grow the business. Is this true? Do we really need these clients? Isn't it possible that we might even grow more if we became braver?

It's a shame that this misguided sense of professionalism is sometimes used as an excuse to put up weird, Orwellian communication barriers between yourself and the world. At best it is a facade to hide behind; at worst it encourages us to emulate so much of what is wrong with large companies. Allow me to paraphrase the simple advice of Elmore Leonard:

If it looks corporate, change it.

The next time you find yourself using professional text, or professional stock images, consider the value of this "professionalism". Is it legitimately helping you communicate? Or is it getting in the way?

• PyJdbc driver
  Could be handy for getting at LucidDb
• pymssql
  Sybase and MS SQL Server from Python
• Trees in SQL - nested set model
• Compiling Python using Clang
• Getting Started with Mock

A little over a year ago we saw the launch of Anyvite, a Y Combinator funded competitor to Evite that was looking to streamline event planning. Tonight, that startup is launching a spin-off site called Tweetvite — a site dedicated to helping plan and discover Tweetups.

For those that haven’t encountered the term before, a Tweetup is a real-life get together between people who use Twitter. Beyond that, the rules are flexible: Tweetups can be large events or small gatherings, can involve grabbing a few drinks or just socializing for a bit, and can be planned for in advance or spontaneous. Founder Jeff Morin says that while there are plenty of sites that cater to traditional events, like birthday and BBQs, the Tweetup niche is underserved.

Setting up an event with Tweetvite will be familiar to anyone who has used an event site like Anyvite or Evite. To get started, you enter the name of your event, the location, who is hosting it, and other essential information. But the site includes a few attributes that you won’t find anywhere else: it asks you to designate a hashtag for the event, as well as a custom shortened URL. The site also makes it easy to Tweet out your event, or share it with other services like Facebook and MySpace. Another big difference from traditional events sites is the fact that Tweetvite offers a directory of upcoming Tweetups (given the nature in which they’re announced, they’re generally open to the public).

Once you’ve created your event, you can use the site’s control panel to monitor for any tweets containing your hashtag and see how many people have viewed your page and RSVP’d. The site also offers a widget that you can embed on your blog to inform visitors of your upcoming tweetup.

Tweetvite looks great, with a very polished interface and a streamlined event creation process that only takes a minute or two. At this point the biggest question in my mind is how many people actually throw Tweetups — they may be becoming increasingly popular but are nowhere near as common as traditional events are, so it may be tough to build a business around this niche. That said, Twitter is obviously still in its infancy, so the number of Tweetups may grow rapidly over the next few years.

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I don’t know about you, but I never really consider September to still be the Summer. But it is, until September 22, anyway. Why that matters is that AT&T promised iPhone users in the U.S. MMS capabilities by “late Summer.” So, technically AT&T, you have three weeks.

I shouldn’t have to remind everyone how utterly ridiculous it is that about three months now after much of the rest of the world got it, the U.S. still has no MMS capabilities for the iPhone. Reasons seem to vary for why exactly it is taking AT&T so long, but my favorite is the one where they have to manually remove MMS opt-out codes from each iPhone contract. Genius planning right there, if that’s true. And still, why exactly does that take three months?

The lawsuits are already starting to come out of the woodwork over the lack of MMS (and tethering) on AT&T. And if AT&T is not able to hit that September 22 date, expect a hell of a lot more. And, of course, more calls for Apple to break up with AT&T. The company bought itself a little bit of time by actually, for once, not having anything to do with a nightmare situation (the Google Voice fiasco). But at the end of the day, AT&T still badly needs to improve its execution.

While the service has been doing some upgrades to its services in particularly bad cities (San Francisco and New York), I think it’s all too easy to forget that we really shouldn’t be lauding them for that — it’s their job to provide us with service, and we’re paying them very well for that. They can complain all they want about being overwhelmed, but we all have contracts that state we pay them and they provide us with service. As I see it, only one side is living up to those contracts: Us.

While Netflix is dishing out unprompted refunds for little hiccups in their service, many of us have probably accumulated days of basically no service with AT&T. How many of those refund emails have you gotten from AT&T? Because I’ve seen none.

Apple is holding an event in one week to show off its new iPods. The event is said to be music-centric, but if we don’t hear a peep from Apple about MMS, I’m going to be pretty worried about the whole “end of Summer” promise. Actually, I’m already worried, it’s freaking September.

Update: And 12 hours later, AT&T responds: MMS will be available September 25. Yes, that’s a few days into Fall, but I hear Fall is the new Summer anyway.

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When it comes to the battle for top talent in Silicon Valley, perks can be a powerful weapon. For years, Google owned this space — you couldn’t read a report on the company without a mention of the search giant’s multiple cafeterias or onsite haircuts. But in the last few years Facebook has been piling on the perks, even going as far as poaching Google’s in-house chef. And today Facebook is taking another page from Google’s playbook: shuttles from San Francisco to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, provided by Bauer’s — the same company used by Google. A number of pleased employees have been tweeting and updating their Facebook statuses with their enthusiastic responses to the announcement.

The news comes only a week after Facebook announced plans to drastically increase the size of its workforce by as much as 50% by the end of the year, during a time when most of Silicon Valley is not hiring and is cutting back on perks. Clearly, the social network is doing everything it can to make the decision to join as easy as possible.

Facebook has spelled out all of its other perks on its homepage, which include a robust benefits package, free food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), free Caltrain passes, and laundry services. The company also used to offer housing vouchers to employees that lived in Palo Alto, but discontinued that program some time ago.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

I’m organizing a half-day startup workshop in San Francisco. This would be a terrific event to attend if you’ve recently started a software company and feel dazed, confused, or just want to bounce ideas off of someone who’s been there.

We’ll keep it small so everybody gets a chance to be heard. Space is extremely limited.

It’s a bonus supplement to the Business of Software conference, which is Nov. 9-11 in San Francisco.

Although the startup workshop itself is free, you do have to pay for for that conference, which is not free, in fact, it’s kind of expensive (but totally worth every penny!) I know it’s kind of expensive for very early stage startups, but trust me on this, it’s worth it.

Here’s what happens. After the main conference finishes up on Wednesday, we’ll divide up into three groups. Each group will do three 90 minute workshops, moderated by:

1. Neil Davidson and Simon Galbraith, the founders of Red Gate Software. Red Gate is a software company in Cambridge, England, founded in 1999, which has now grown to about 160 people. It was founded with no VC and little debt. In 2006 it was Cambridge News business of the year and has been in the Sunday Times top 100 places to work for the last three years running. They’ve recently launched Springboard, an amazing startup incubator that provides advice, office space, free lunch, and pocket money, and takes no equity in return.
2. Joel Spolsky (oh wait that’s me) and Michael Pryor, the founders of Fog Creek Software.
3. Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, a software platform for internet marketing. Previously he founded Pyramid Digital Solutions, a bootstrapped company acquired by SunGard. Most of you know him from his blog OnStartups.com or from the terrific talk [video] he gave at last year’s conference.

The format is very open. It’s a chance to chat, bounce ideas around, ask questions, solve specific problems, get feedback, and learn from each other.

After the workshops we’ll regroup with Jason Calacanis, who will do a live broadcast of his podcast This Week in Startups and take your questions live. Jason is on his third startup. The first, Silicon Alley Reporter, was the flagship magazine of New York City’s short-lived dot com boom; after the crash of 2000 it closed down. His second startup was Weblogs Inc, the first really serious commercial blog network, which sold to AOL for an undisclosed sum (let’s call it $25 million, shall we?) After turning netscape.com into a Digg clone, Jason spent some time at a fancy-pants VC firm, Sequoia Capital, where he hatched the idea for his current startup, Mahalo, which they funded. Anyway now he’s got this terrific podcast and he’ll be doing it live and we’ll be his audience, so you’ll have a rare chance to ask Jason questions in person and hear him pontificate.

Here’s how to sign up.

If you haven’t registered for BOS2009 yet, go do that. During the registration process, you’ll see a checkbox that says “I'd like to come to Joel's startup bootcamp”. It’s not a bootcamp, really. You won’t have to do pushups or work very hard. But check that box anyway.

If you already registered for BOS2009, follow this link. Click on “Already Registered.” Log on, and look for the link that says Event Fees. Why does it say that? I don’t know. After you click on that link you’ll be able to check the box that says “I'd like to come to Joel's startup bootcamp”. It’s still not a bootcamp. Really. Bootcamp is where you run around in circles for 20 weeks without getting more than four hours of sleep a night while drill sergeants barely a year older than you foam at the mouth and berate you endlessly like that time Tom Hanks flips out at Bitty Schram in A League of Their Own. “There’s no crying in baseball!” Anyway, NOT THAT AT ALL. This will be more of a friendly conversation with successful software startup founders. Not bootcamp.

Space is extremely limited: there will be three groups of 24 founders each. No more than two attendees per startup, please. See you in San Francisco!

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important to them are the links associated with Digg. If a story is popular on Digg, it will also likely garner quite a few links back to it. But even if it doesn’t become popular, the link coming from Digg itself gives some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes.

Digg using nofollow has been a subject of debate since at least 2007, when the service was exploding with popularity. Around that time, Wikipedia decided to use nofollow for all of its outbound links. But what’s interesting here is that Digg isn’t adding nofollow to all of its links, and instead is only doing it for the untrusted ones.

“This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community,” Digg’s John Quinn writes today. This would seem to suggest that company realizes it’s still in the interest of most content providers to get the link juice that comes from Digg. It would also seem to suggest that it doesn’t want firestorm of controversy similar to the one it created with the DiggBar.

This move comes at an interesting time for Digg, as sites like Bit.ly look to be setting up to battle for who has the most interesting link data on the Internet. Twitter itself has been testing out the tracking of links from its site, though it claims to be just doing so for internal product purposes.

How Digg judges which sites they trust, they don’t say. But one would have to assume that these sites are different from the ones that are straight-up blocked from the service for being spammy. Untrusted links in comments, profiles and story pages will also get the nofollow tag as well.

[photo: flickr/brianware3000]

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This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions’ healthBase, a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed. But is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine?

Several of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really.

The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew? I’ve included the screenshots of the results below if you don’t believe me. Now, I don’t think that healthBase is being intentionally anti-semitic, but for a technology which is supposed to understand the nuances of human language, this is about a big a fail as you can get. It is plainly obvious that its technology needs to be fixed before it is parsed out to other companies and media corporations.

I emailed NetBase to figure out exactly how this could appear and this is the response I received:

This is an unfortunate example of homonymy, i.e. words that have different meanings.
The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease “AIDS” and the verb “aids” (as in aiding someone). If you click on the result “Jew” you see a sentence from a Wikipedia page about 7th Century history: “Hispano-Visigothic king Egica accuses the Jews of aiding the Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery. ” Although Wikipedia contains a lot of great health information it also contains non-health related information (like this one) that is hard to filter out.

Personally, I think such basic distinctions should have been ironed out before launching the site. This is just the most flagrant example of site giving non-health answers to health-related questions. If you look at the pros of AIDS (yes, it thinks here are pros to having AIDS), it comically lists the “Spanish Civil War.” One of the causes of hemorrhoids is “Bronco” (I don’t even want to know).

HealthBase is touted to be a showcase for NetBase’s semantic technology, which can supposedly understand language. Clearly, it doesn’t understand language well enough. And if the technology is going to be peddled to other companies to be used to power additional search engines, it needs to be improved immediately.

UPDATE: Here’s a more detailed response from NetBase:

Yesterday, we launched a microsite - healthbase.netbase.com - intended
to publicly demonstrate a new kind of semantic search technology that
actually reads web content and delivers more relevant answers to
health-related queries. HealthBase is built on our Content Intelligence
Platform that has been deployed successfully in different domains by
Fortune 1000 companies, global publishers, and the federal government
over the last few years for a variety of strategic applications. A
ready-for-primetime consumer search engine it is not.

It is a powerful and automated technology, that when applied to
something as messy as the Web, will produce some amazing results, but
also some strange, funny and irrelevant ones. Our first release of
healthBase yesterday surfaced a few embarrassing and offensive bugs.
These were far in the minority of results but enough to keep us up late
improving the site. We sincerely regret and apologize in particular for
any offense caused.

We’ve learned a lot in the last 24 hours and are fully committed to do
better in providing an effective and accurate demonstration of our
technology. This morning, we are a little tired and humbled, but even
more determined than ever to showcase the power of this new technology.
You will see improvements in the next hours days, and weeks, including
the addition of user feedback mechanisms. We appreciate the feedback and
please keep telling us what you think.

Thanks,

Jens Tellefsen, VP of marketing and product strategy & The Netbase Team

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

PyCon talk proposals are due October 1, which is less than a month (four weeks) away. I have already submitted a talk on custom importers and using importlib to write your own.

The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its application Line2 approved by Apple — nearly three months after it was originally submitted. The powerful service allows business employees to assign two phone numbers to their iPhone: one that they can give to family and friends, and another that can be given to business contacts, with features that allow for call filtering and a professional-grade voicemail system. But it’s also notable for its many similarities to Google Voice, an application that Apple has kept out of the App Store for months now.

The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban.

Line2, an iPhone client that lets you easily tap into the Toktumi service, got caught in the crossfire. From a technical standpoint the application is quite similar to Google Voice: both services allow you to hand out a ‘virtual number’ to contacts. When they call, the service can either relay the call to your ‘real’ number (the AT&T number assigned to your iPhone), or it can send it to voicemail, depending on the way you’ve set up your call filters. You can also use both services to make cheap long distance calls. In fact, the Line2 app was built by developer Sean Kovacs — the same developer who built GV Mobile, one of the handful of third party Google Voice apps that Apple pulled.

But there are some key differences. For one, Toktumi doesn’t include support for SMS at all; Google Voice does. And Toktumi costs $14.95 a month, while Google Voice is free. Toktumi is also marketing its service to a very different audience: while Google Voice is trying to let you use a single phone number for everything, Toktumi wants to give small business employees who lack a dedicated work line the flexibility to use two phone numbers from the same mobile phone, and includes some features that Google Voice doesn’t. Here’s how we previously described it:

Line2 would allow users to use two different numbers with their iPhones — one which they could hand out for business calls, and the other for personal. This setup would allow employees to keep their personal numbers private, and also allows businesses to set up professional features on the business line, with features like an phone directory (”Press 1 for sales…”) and a single support number that calls the mobile phones of multiple employees.

Even with those differences, Toktumi CEO Peter Sisson says that many consumers do actually use the service as an alternative to Google Voice — if you just hand out your Toktumi number to everyone, you can use the service’s filtering options to manage your calls much as you would with Google’s service (he does note that Toktumi’s filtering is less flexible than Google’s, but it should be sufficient for most people).

Soon after the Google Voice story broke, Sisson grew concerned that his application’s similarities might keep it from being accepted to the App Store, so he attempted to reach out to Apple executive Phil Schiller. Schiller got back to him, saying that he would have an answer soon. Then the FCC launched its inquiry, and Apple went silent. Sisson says he’s been pestering Apple over the last month, and it looks like his persistence worked.

It’s great news to hear that Line2 has been accepted, and it may indicate that Apple is coming closer to accepting Google Voice — given Apple’s approval of Vonage this morning, it the App Store may even have some new policies in place regarding this kind of app (though details on the Vonage app are still sparse). Also worth noting: Line2 clearly “replaces” the phone’s Voicemail and keyboard in the same way Apple complained about in its FCC response about Google Voice (this claim has always been laughable). If Apple still won’t approve Google Voice after this, it will be clear, as if it wasn’t already, that it’s not worried about the user experience — it’s worried about Google.

If you’d like to try Toktumi out for yourself, visit Line2.com, and the first 200 US-based users to sign up using the promo code 743623718 will be able to access 3 months of unlimited US/Canada calling and cheap international calls, as well as Toktumi’s other features like a professional-grade voicemail system. You can download the iPhone app here.

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Event ticketing and management site amiando is reporting some impressive growth in revenues. In a company update the private German startup is circulating, it is reporting 200 percent annual revenue growth in the second quarter, and 65 percent growth over the first quarter of 2009. The report doesn’t give absolute numbers, but I’ve learned that it is in the range of a few million Euros a year, split evenly between its two main businesses, amiandoTICKETS (ticket sales) and amiandoEVENTS (event registration and management). The company says it is on track to become profitable by early next year.

On the ticketing side, amiando is selling about 30 million Euros worth of tickets a year, of which it gets a cut of 7.5 percent or less. It offers tickets in 15 currencies and has been used for more than 70,000 events since it launched three years ago. About 45 percent of its revenues still come from its home country of Germany, but more than half come from outside. And since it opened up its ticketing API last December, about a dozen social networks now offer amiando as a ticketing app.

Facebook Connect alone accounts for 5 percent of its event traffic and 2 percent of revenues. And Twitter recommendations are growing fast. Although email recommendations drives more referrals than anything else.

While Amiando is coming up the ranks, it still trails Eventbrite in traffic. Other competitors include Eventbee and TicketLeap.

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More information is coming in about that $14 million third round of financing that personal finance service Mint closed last month. That financing, we’ve heard from two sources close to the company, valued Mint at a whopping $140 million post-money valuation.

That’s not bad for a company that launched just two years ago - Mint won the top prize at TechCrunch50 2007.

In a “normal” round of financing a company would dilute by 25-35%, meaning the expected valuation on a $14 million round would be, roughly, $45 million - $60 million. The $140 million valuation shows two things - Mint is on a roll, and they don’t seem to need much capital.

Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.

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There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance.

Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook.

So if you need a Web designer or sales person for a project, for example, you can create a task on Producteev and share that not only with your co-workers, but also publish it on Twitter. A link brings your Twitter followers back to a public page on Producteev for that specific task/message, where they can reply. All outside replies are brought into the Producteev activity stream for everyone in your work group to see. This is good, but it doesn’t go far enough, as you can’t reply via Producteev and have that reply appear on Twitter.

Another new feature makes Producteev like a Friendfeed of productivity apps. It lets you bring in other streams of data from outside Producteev, including Slideshare, Scribd, Zoho, Twitter, and soon Google Docs, Google Reader, and Yammer (yes, it competes with Yammer on the communication stream, but Producteev is more about task management). So you can automatically see when someone on your team adds a new presentation to Slideshare, edits a doc, or shares an article.

There is also now a timeline/calendar view, which comes in handy since every task can be assigned a due date. (The other views are a dashboard grid that is similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, and a straight, chronological activity stream). Workers can now generate reports based on their tasks in progress and completed, which they can show to employers to prove they’ve been working (oDesk anyone?). Soon Producteev will add graphs as well for productivity tracking at a glance.

Other upcoming features on the product roadmap include integration with Meebo Community IM for chat functionality, the ability to export deadlines and reminders to iCal, Google Calendar, and Outllook, an OpenSocial application on Xing, and a JoliCloud app.

Producteev is gradually becoming a fully-featured online productivity and collaboration tool. I would compare it to WizeHive, another great online task management tool with a slightly different set of features. Producteev is seed funded, and recently raised $180,000 in angel money from a group including Fotolia president Oleg Tscheltzoff.

The service is free for up to 3 users, and then starts at $19/ month up to 10 users. The top Gold membership is $99/month for 100 users. Different pricing applies to university students, another target market. We’re giving away 10 Gold subscriptions for one year to whoever adds the best comments below about their greatest productivity challenge or suggestions for new features. Abehassera will pick the best 10 and respond in comments.

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Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. Over the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million unique U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since then (comScore).

Yelp also has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps.

Yelp’s pageviews and average time spent per user on the site are also up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average time spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below). It’s hard to say what is causing these drops. It could be that people are not finding what they are looking for, or the opposite, that they are finding what they need faster due to better site design. I suspect it has something to do with the latter. For instance, a much-improved Citysearch redesign went site-wide in March and Yelp is constantly tweaking its site. Update: Kara Nortman, the executive who runs Citysearch, says that the pageview numbers are down slightly, but not as much as comScore suggests. Part of this has to do with Citysearch actually going through the site and “pulling out pages that are not great consumer experiences,” which hurts SEO, but improves the site overall. Citysearch is also trying to reduce the number of searches it takes ti get to what you want, which also causes pageviews to drop.

I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about the pageview situation, and he sent me an internal Google Analytics chart pasted at bottom of this post). “As you can see we’ve continued to grow pageviews smoothly throughout the summer,” he says, “so it looks like the effect Comscore is reporting is spurious.” There is definitely a discrepancy there. Stoppleman also says that worldwide Yelp did 157 million pageviews in August (although he thinks that is becoming a less a meaningful metric as Ajax redesigns reduce the need for page refreshes) and more than 25 million unique visitors. (The comScore numbers cited above are only for the U.S.)

Yelp came out with a major update for its iPhone app in April, right about the time the pageviews started to allegedly decline. But Stoppelman doesn’t think that is it either. There might be some shift over to mobile, but he’s seeing the following trends:

Mobile usage for us is lowest early in the week and climbs throughout, peaking on Saturday. Desktop web usage (especially contributions) tends to be highest on Monday or Tuesday (though Yelp.com reader traffic sometimes peaks on Fridays as people plan their weekend in the office ;).

No matter which way you cut the numbers, though, Yelp is gaining fast on Citysearch. Update “I worry about everyone,” says Citysearch’s Nortman. “I think you’ll start to see some pretty strategic initiatives roll out across the web and mobile. We have this new neighborhood platform in place. We have to fill it up with trusted content.” That is how Citysearch will try to stand apart, by having reviews and other content that is more trustworthy than Yelp’s. Which site do you trust more?

Average Minutes Per Visitor

Total Pageviews

Yelp’s Daily Pageviews (Google Analytics)

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Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android.

Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.

Users who have played with the iPhone version should feel at home with this app. But it has a few features that the iPhone version doesn’t, such as integrated maps and a one-click check-in process. Other areas like the friends check-in list and the page to display your badges are largely the same as the iPhone version, but the app has the distinctive Android look and feel.

One advantage the Android platform has over the iPhone is that applications can run in the background. But Foursquare for Android chooses not to take advantage of that, and instead opts for speed and better battery life. “No “location aware” always-on background services or application bloat to drain your battery over the course of the night,” is how they phrase it. Since Foursquare is all about manually checking-in places, that makes sense.

With the app now complete, the next revisions will focus on performance and UI, LaPenna says. But there are also some new features that both they and Foursquare have planned. “We of course plan on adding features to the app but we’re not sure what order we’re going to tackle them in,” LaPenna says.

Having another mobile application for Foursquare should certainly help with its adoption. And Android is especially key since a lot of geeky early adopters have Android phones. There is also work being done on a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app. The latter I’ve seen in action, as my friend Anand Iyer has been working on it. It has a few great features also not found on the iPhone app including the ability to ping you if three of your friends check-in somewhere that you are not. And placing your friends on an actual map to show where they are (think Latitude).

One really nice thing about the new Android app is that it’s open-source. LaPenna and Brummel have already had plenty of others help in building it. You can find out more about it on the Google Code page for the project. They’ve also written up some documentation for first-time Foursquare Android users.

The Android Foursquare app is available in the Android Market right now for free, or you can grab the app from the Google Code page and install it yourself.

Update: DailyFinance published some other interesting information today in a profile of Foursquare. The most interesting part is that Foursquare is preparing to announce a round of seed funding. We’ve heard that as well from a couple sources. From what we hear, the company is actually looking for less money than some investors are offering.

Look for a low seven figure seed round to be announced in the coming weeks. And one name that is continually thrown around as being involved is Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson. And where he is putting money, you can often find Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet close by as well. Nothing confirmed yet, that’s just what we’re hearing.

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In The Book of Lies, the diabolically brilliant occultist Alesteir Crowley once wrote:

“Explain this happening!”

“It must have a natural cause!”
“It must have a supernatural cause!”

Let these two asses be set to grind corn!

In the original, there is a sort of grouping bracket connecting the second and third lines lines and pointing at the fourth. Crowley was asserting, in both lucid and poetic terms, that to the understanding mind the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is meaningless, an argument conducted about language categories with no predictive value.

Alfred Korzybski would have agreed with him. The founder of General Semantics built his powerful discipline on the insight that “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined”. This matters because, too often, we fall into dispute over features of our maps, blithely ignoring the territory underneath.

Ever since reading the Book of Lies, I have considered “Let these two asses be set to grind corn!” to be the most appropriate thing to say when two people or factions have fallen into an argument that is strictly about map rather than territory. It does the job just as well as a more reasoned argument, I find. The imagery makes both sides look absurd, which can be a much more effective way than logic to jolt them out of their fixed categories.

I was reminded of this recently in connection with the longstanding argument between natural-law and consequentialist libertarians. Like the more general and historically much older argument between virtue ethicists and utilitarians, the dispute is interminable because it rests upon a false distinction from which nonsense follows. Utilitarians don’t get that virtue ethics is an evolved tactic to prevent destructive short-termism in one’s utility calculations; virtue ethicists don’t get that without a consequential check on the outcomes of “virtue” it rapidly becomes sterile or perverse.

Similarly, “human rights” is properly understood not as some mystical intrinsic property of humans ordained by God or natural law or whatever, but as the minimum set of premises from which it is possible to construct a society that isn’t consequentially hell on earth. But carving those in stone - using the language of rights and absolutes — is functional, too; it’s a way of protecting them from erosion by short-term expediency. For the best outcome, we must reason like consequentialists but speak and legislate like natural-law thinkers.

The universe doesn’t care about the human distinction between a-priori and consequentialist arguments; that’s all map. The territory is what people do, the actual choices they express in action. Thus…

“Human rights are founded on natural law!”
“Human rights are justified by consequential considerations!”
Let these two asses be set to grind corn!

Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.

Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we’ve heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel.

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Much has changed since Blogger was released in August of 1999. Writing about Blogger's founding in his book Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg describes the effect of Blogger simply: "It cleared the obstacles from the path between brain and Web page." As the phenomenon of blogging has grown and evolved over the past ten years, so too has Blogger, adapting to a world of fast-paced communication and allowing millions to tell their stories. When Google acquired Blogger in February of 2003, about 250,000 people visited Blogger per month. Today, that number is more than 300 million.

In our announcement about the Blogger acquisition, we said (somewhat ironically, not in a blog post — the Official Google Blog was still more than a year away): "Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." We're proud that Blogger continues to be a force for free expression worldwide and that it is growing quickly despite its maturity. In the past two years alone, the number of people contributing to a blog has more than doubled, and every second of every day, a new blog is created on Blogger.

To commemorate Blogger's 10th birthday, we've been releasing birthday presents as our way of saying thanks to the millions of users who have made Blogger what it is today. So far, we have released 5 presents and today we're announcing 2 more, courtesy of two Blogger partners:

• Socialvibe: When Socialvibe approached us about finding a way to empower the Blogger community to help raise funds for charities, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to leverage Blogger's reach to do some good. Starting this week, Blogger users can show their support for charities and raise funds by adding a gadget to their blog. The Socialvibe team has challenged us to raise $50,000 for charity by the end of the year, and we're pretty confident we can beat that.
• InfoThinker: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and a Blogger blog, you're in luck. The team at InfoThinker (makers of the iPhone app BlogPress) was eager to help celebrate Blogger's birthday. Earlier this week they submitted a free version of BlogPress that works only on Blogger to the iPhone App Store. Blogging on the go has never been so easy! Keep an eye out for the app.

Here is the full list of presents. We have more in store over the next couple weeks, and we're just as excited about a number of developments planned for later in the year. With thanks to Blogger founders Meg, Paul and Ev without whom we wouldn't have a 10th birthday to celebrate, and to the millions of people around the world who rely on Blogger to tell their story every day, here's to our next decade.

Posted by Rick Klau, Product Manager

QOTW: "I like how being very friendly means calling people after a guy who
tried to blow up the English Parliament." - Carl Banks
[link]
unichr/ord cannot handle characters outside the BMP in a narrow build:
[link]

Relations of Language and Thought: The View from Sign Language and Deaf Children provides an interesting angle on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that we periodically discuss on LtU. A small sample from Google Books is available.

...Hypothesis concerning language and thought...:

• Language equals thought. Perhaps the simplest view of language and thought is that they are essentially the same thing. This position is most frequently ascribed to American behaviorists, and especially to John Watson, who argued that thought is just subvocal speech.
• Language and thought are independent. This view, most often attributed to theorists like Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, suggests that the development of language and the development of cognition are distinct, dependending on different underlying processes and experiences.
• Language determines thought. In the form usually identified with the linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity theories of Sapir and Whorf, this perspective directly entails a correlation between language skill and cognitive skill. One implication of this view is that individuals who have "inferior" (or superlative) language are expected to have "inferior" (or superlative) thought. Implicitly or explicitly, such a perspective has been used as a rationale for an emphasis on spoken language for deaf children by those who have seen sign language as little more than a set of pragmatic gestures.

...The more interesting question... is whether growing up with exposure to a signed language affects cognition in a way different from growing up with a spoken language. Indeed, that is one of the fundamental questions of this volume. While we fully agree... that any strong form of the Sapir-Whorf position appears untenable, it also seems clear that language can affect and guide cognition in a variety of ways. Much of what a child knows about the world, from religion to the habitats of penguins, is acquired through language.

Sign language is an obvious candidate for linguistic study, since the mode is visual as opposed to oral/aural. The summary of one of the authors is telling:

The conclusion that American Sign Language (ASL) is an independent, noncontrived, fully grammatical human language comparable to any spoken language has been supported by over 30 years of research. Recent research has shown that ASL displays principles of organization remarkably like those for spoken languages, at discourse, semantic, syntactic, morphological, and even phonological levels. Furthermore, it is acquired, processed, and even breaks down in ways analogous to those found for spoken languages. The similarities between signed and spoken languages are strong enough to make the differences worth investigating. In the third section of this chapter, I will argue that although there are differences in detail, the similarities are strong enough to conclude that essentially the same language mechanism underlies languages in either modality.

On a programming language level, I can't help but think that sign language offers valuable clues into the nature of visual PLs (though I haven't quite nailed down any specifics). ASL on Wikipedia informs us that signs can be broken down into three categories:

• Transparent: Non-signers can usually correctly guess the meaning
• Translucent: Meaning makes sense to non-signers once it is explained
• Opaque: Meaning cannot be guessed by non-signers

With the majority of signs being opaque. As much as those who design visual languages would like them to be intuitive - falling into the Transparent and Translucent category - I figure you still have to end up using many signs that are only meaningful internally to the language at hand.

On a personal level, I have recently been attempting to delve into ASL. I've almost got the alphabet and numbers down, and have a vocabulary of about 100 additional signs - which probably means that I'm at the proficiency level of somewhere between ankle biter and sesame street. I do find it to be a fascinating language. I noticed when I was looking at the course offerings for college (my son started university this year) that ASL is now offered for foreign language credit (wish it had been offered when I was a student all those years ago).

Sometimes you come across something and don’t know exactly what it is. What if you could snap a photo on your iPhone, upload it to a site where people can submit answers and vote on the best ones, and send out a link to everyone you know on Twitter to get them to weigh in? That basically describes idthis, a simple site developed by Billy Chasen, who previously created chartbeat (which I covered here) and firef.ly for betaworks.

With idthis, which is both a Website and an iPhone app (iTunes link), the concept is pretty simple, but I can see it going in different directions. One is a simple utility. You see an old BMW convertible on the street and want to know what year it is. Send a photo to idthis. It could also be a way to play visual games. Take a closeup of an object or make it slightly blurry and see who can guess what it is first. (Obscene photos will be taken down and can be flagged by the community).

The instructions on the site state:

Just snap a photo of something you’d like identified (like a breed of dog, a type of car, that weird gelatinous blob sitting on your plate, or even that celebrity sitting next to you that you can’t remember their name, etc…) and then send it to be identified.

Anyone can submit an answer. Once an answer gets five votes, the picture becomes officially identified (you can change the number of votes required to identify a picture when you submit it). Here’s one I put up. See if you guys can guess what it is.

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Talk about strange - while Google Voice can’t get so much as their foot in the App Store’s door, Vonage has just done a pirouette and waltzed right through. According to a recent release from the Jersey-based VOIP giant, their new Vonage mobile application has been approved for inclusion into Apple’s App Store as soon as it comes out of beta. Details at this point are still lacking: we have no idea when it will actually release, nor do we know how much it’ll cost for all you Vonage-faithful out there. The press release doesn’t even go into what kind of services the app will provide, but we can certainly hazard a few guesses.

Online wine store and community site Vinfolio has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Panorama Capital after receiving an undisclosed amount of angel investment earlier. San Francisco-based Vinfolio offers a set of integrated services and resources to basically help wine enthusiasts and collectors buy, sell, manage and enjoy wine.

Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.

There’s no shortage of wine-related websites and services out there. From the top of my head: review sites Snooth and Corkd, Vinogusto, good old Wine.com and wine ‘discovery’ service Adegga, although I’m sure there are many more.

Curious to see if Vinfolio will manage to gain mind and market share in this corked crowded space.

Cheers!

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The top sanitation truck drivers in the mid-Atlantic area converged on Pen Arygl, Pennsylvania for the regional finals of the SWANA Trash Collectors Road-E-O. And the results have been posted [pdf].

Only A Game's Ron Schachter reports [mp3]. (Despite the wackiness, the competition does highlight skills that all truck drivers need to master in order to complete their rounds.)

And there's plenty of beeping.

When foreign nationals come to work at Microsoft, the legal department gets to work with the paperwork of applying for permanent residency (colloquially known as a green card even though the cards haven't been green for a long time). Obtaining permanent resident status in the United States takes a ridiculous amount of time, and I remember the irony when one of my colleagues finally received his green card... on his last day working at Microsoft.

Still, at least it arrived in time, if only barely. :: Wendy :: received her green card two months after she left the country.

Dimdim, the open source web conferencing software company backed by $8.4 million in venture capital, today launched Dimdim Webinar, which allows SMBs and individuals to host an unlimited amount of completely web-based webinars with up to 1,000 people using nothing but a web browser.

Dimdim has arranged to provide free Dimdim Webinar accounts to up to 300 TechCrunch readers by signing up right here. The winners will be notified by e-mail.

In addition to its new product, the startup announced a partnership with Eventbrite, a provider of online event management and ticketing services, to enable webinars organizers to make money with web-based meeting and events.

Dimdim Webinar builds on the Dimdim 5.1 platform, which is said to be used by more than three million people and businesses today, and doesn’t require users to install any software whether they want to watch or participate in webinars, presentations, etc. The company is also debuting a customizable widget today that allows for webinar organizers to easier distribute one-click registration forms and links to detailed information web pages.

Dimdim Webinar is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars, including an affiliate program that pays up to $150 for each webinar signup, help videos and guides and this dedicated microsite, a free eBook and the ability to schedule and provide tickets to webinars for free or for a fee through its exclusive partnership with Eventbrite.

Pricing for Dimdim Webinar starts at $75 per month, but there’s a free 30-day trial available and if the number of attendees you want to accommodate doesn’t exceed 20 than you can use the limited, free version. Or you could go back to the top of this post and see if you can get that free premium account.

Similar offerings include GoToMeeting and WebEx, which both offer more features at higher prices.

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Andy Hertzfeld is a bona fide Software Wizard. I'm not kidding: it was his official job title, codified on his business card. And not just any old business card, but one from Apple Computer. You see, not only was Andy a key player on the Macintosh team, but he also had a knack for doing the impossible. One his feats was described in the September 1995 issue of Byte Magazine.

Besides everything else he did to help get the first Macintosh out the door, Andy Hertzfeld wrote all the first desk accessories. Most of these were written in assembly. However, to show that desk accessories could also be written in higher-level languages, Hertzfeld wrote a demonstration puzzle games desk accessory in Pascal. Like its plastic counterparts, users moved squares around until the numbers 1 to 9 were in order. As time began to get short, the decision was made that the puzzle, at 7KB [7KB = 7168 bytes], was too big (and too game-like) to ship with the first Macintosh. In a single weekend, Hertzfeld rewrote the program to take up only 800 bytes. The puzzle shipped with the Mac.

That's pretty impressive, especially considering that simply telling the story took a little under 800 bytes. Fortunately, Andy did have one thing going for him: sliding puzzles — especially of the 3² variety — are pretty simple. There are nine squares and eight pieces, and a piece can slide into the empty square.

1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8

A solved puzzle will have the pieces arranged in left-right/top-bottom order, with the empty square being in the bottom right, as shown above.

Bring Your Own Code

Your exercise for the day: write a function that solves a 3² sliding puzzle.

• The input should be a series of nine numbers (string, integer array, etc) that represent the eight pieces and the empty square.
• The output should be a series of numbers that represent a solved puzzle.
• The sort logic should follow the sliding puzzle rules and can take one of three forms:
  • Easy - whatever it takes to solve the puzzle, even random moves
  • Medium - an algorithm that makes a reasonable attempt to solve the puzzle
  • Difficult - an algorithm that solves using the most efficient path possible

As far as I'm aware, there are no impossible starting configurations and your function should be able to process any series of nine numbers.

Mind mapping application builder MeisterLabs, the startup behind brainstorm & planning tool MindMeister, acquired the MindMaker, iPhone app in January and now it’s available in the app store as a full-blown MindMeister app.

MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool that allows you to create, share and collaborate on mind maps. The new re-jiged iPhone app has some key differences. Namely it supports sharing mind maps and also supports MindMeister’s “geistesblitz” or “brainwave” feature which allows you to insert those brilliant eureka ideas that you get when you’re in the bathroom into your default mind map on the mindmeister site. Perfect for the iPhone.

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There are so many information portals on the web for health information, it can be tough to decipher which one is the best resource to answer a medical question. NetBase Solutions has launched healthBase, a powerful semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and the Mayo Clinic’s health site.

HealthBase uses NetBase’s proprietary search intelligence technology to read sentences inside documents and linguistically understand the meaning of the content. Thus, healthBase’s search engine can automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; the pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food, and more.

The search engine’s results are impressive. When you type in a search for the available treatments for diabetes, you are given results that are broken down by 63 drugs and medications used to treat the disease, 70 common treatments for diabetes, and 20 appropriate food and plants for the treatment of diabetes. You can also see the pros and cons of certain treatments. Search results appear disarmingly fast and will take you to the appropriate site where the content and information is hosted.

There’s no doubt that this is a useful site to tap into the vast variety of health information there is on the web, but I find the site to be slightly impersonal. Medical information, which can be daunting and sterile, is sometimes best served with a human touch on the web, especially when it comes to consumer knowledge. Medpedia is a good example of a site that contains a large amount of content that also has a social element.

But healthBase serves a valid purpose as an aggregator of medical content and will surely help those looking for a comprehensive research tool. Parent company NetBase won’t serve advertising on the site but monetizes its technology by powering internal search engines for companies that have large databases of content. Healthbase is a public demonstration of its technology.

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Back in February we were excited to see a sort of “Humorous Twitter” appear in the form of Popjam. Ok, so it was more a microblogging-meets-Digg-meets-CollegeHumour, but as we said at the time, getting Twitter integration fast would really help.

Aiming at College Humour and eBaumsworld or Icanhascheezburger with something Twitter-like seemed like a no-brainer. However, although they used the Twitter mechanic of ‘follow’, they didn’t integrate with Twitter at launch and therefore didn’t get on the back of Twitter’s recent massive growth. That looks to have been a costly mistake.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google is clearly moving fast in setting up partnerships with ebook reader manufacturers and store operators to give some weight to its threat to Amazon and the latter’s Kindle product line.

First, the company teamed up with Sony, adding about 1 million public domain books to the technology giant’s eBook Store.

Now Mountain View has sealed a deal with British Interead, bringing the same amount of ebooks to an online store outside the U.S. for the first time (where close to half a million of them are available for free).

Reading-based Interead is the company behind ebook store COOLERBOOKS. The company also manufactures COOL-ER eReaders, small, elegant ebook readers that kinda look like giant iPods and cost $249 in the United States.

COOLERBOOKS.com accommodates 19 document formats, including EPUB and PDF, and MP3 for audio books, giving the ebookstore the broadest range of formats available on the web.

Enough to pose a threat to Amazon, just the beginning, or a venture destined for failure? Time will tell, but it’s always good to have alternative free ebook stores, even if you won’t be finding the bestsellers over there.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

At the Nokia World 2009 event in Stuttgart, Nokia Beta Labs has announced a number of new services ready for testing right now. The most interesting one is Ovi Lifecasting, an application we caught wind of yesterday but is now ready for limited early bird beta-testing.

The beta tool, which requires a Nokia N97 device, taps into Facebook to enable you to share status updates and photos with your Facebook friends and also lets you share your location through Ovi Maps (also in beta). Here’s an introduction video featuring two polished young men using the application to hook up with each other in some city:

Also new is an extension of Nokia Messaging called Social Messaging, which interestingly Nokia calls the groundwork for an impending proprietary multi-community social networking client. The company insists this is an early look, and currently only supports Facebook:

In other news, Nokia Beta Labs is discontinuing Nokia Friend View, which was an experimental research project from Nokia Research Center. We covered the app, which was basically a location-aware microblogging tool when it was introduced in November 2008.

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San Diego based BrightScope, which launched earlier this year, helps people understand their 401k retirement plans and how to maximize the benefits.

That’s a much needed service: the company says 30% of workers don’t participate at all in their company 401k programs. 22% don’t contribute enough to maximize matching benefits from companies, and 80% of workers have no idea how much they’re paying in 401k administrative and other fees. BrightScope shines a light on all that and helps people take better advantage of these programs.

The company has raised a $2 million second round of financing, led by Steelpoint Capital Partners, to continue to build out the service.

Jim Cacavo from Steelpoint and