Deflexion.com

The Cloud, WebApps, and Desktop Apps

2008-04-13T16:02:00.004+01:00

Cloud computing has been around since the beginning of the Internet and actually in the beginning it was just the cloud. Back then you telnetted to a host in the cloud and ran apps on that cloud-based host that accessed cloud-based data. For example this is how email, Usenet, and ftp worked. Let's call that Web 0.0. The revolution that brought the Internet to the masses was the creation of desktop apps that could access the cloud. Let's call that Web 1.0. With Web 2.0 there was a lot of excitement about moving apps off the desktop and onto the cloud. These web-based apps made it easy to run your apps and access your data independent of what desktop computer you were using. To me this was pretty much the same as Web 0.0, except instead of living in telnet windows, you lived in browser windows. Now people are getting excited about moving their web-based apps to the desktop. For example, look at all the desktop-based Twitter apps. And look at all the excitement about rich Internet application platforms such as Adobe AIR, Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism, all of which bring WebApps to the desktop. So are we back at Web 1.0 or is this Web 3.0? Or maybe Web 2.5?

Comparing Social Bookmarking Services

2008-04-05T16:29:00.004+01:00

The last post about my Procmail Quick Start being bookmarked 300 times at del.icio.us inspired me to look at other social bookmarking services and see how popular the Procmail Quick Start (PQS) is elsewhere. Here's what I found.

It seems that del.icio.us is where the nerds hang out and it makes sense that every time I look around for a better bookmarking service, I decide that del.icio.us is the best choice for me, at least for now. Of the alternate bookmarking services I just looked at, Simpy looks the most interesting, especially the link history page, which includes a graph. What do you think? What social bookmarking service(s) do you use and why?

IUseThis: Social Networking for Nerds

2007-11-12T16:40:00.002Z

I pay a lot of attention to software as you can tell by looking at the sidebar on the Deflexion.com home page, where I list tools and services that I use or that I'm considering using. I recently started using osx.iusethis.com to track the Mac OS X software that I use. It's an easy way to find out about updates, to learn about tips & problems from other users, and to learn about other software that I might like. Lots of people blog about the OS X software that they use and I often bookmark such posts in my del.icio.us bookmarks with the tag OSX, but it's overwhelming to go through these posts and decide what software I might actually want to try. IUseThis is a fun way to browse through software lists and quickly get a sense of what software might be useful to me. To me, IUseThis is an example of social networking for nerds. If you're a nerd like me and wondering what all the excitement about social networking is about, I recommend that you try IUseThis or some other object-centric social network service. To learn about social networking, see:

Social network service at Wikipedia.org
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

To learn about the distinction between object-centric social networks and ego-centric social networks, see:

Social Network Transitions by Fred Stutzman

I'm mainly interested in using object-centric social networks, such as IUseThis and social bookmarking services, and my guess is that this is also the case for my fellow nerds.

Trying Flock, the Social Web Browser

2007-10-08T10:33:00.001+01:00

I'm experimenting with Flock, the social web browser, and this post is mainly to test Flock's built-in blogging tool. Flock is based on Firefox and is produced by a for-profit company named Flock. The Flock browser is gratis, but I'm not sure how libre it is. If you have thoughts about Flock, please post a comment. Update: According to the Flock (web browser) page at Wikipedia.org, the Flock browser can be licensed under either the GPL license or the MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license, so it seems that it is FLOSS. To learn more about Flock, the company, see Flock at AboutUs.org and at CrunchBase.com.

The Dying Thunderbird

2007-07-30T12:23:00.000+01:00

The Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) currently produces two products: the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email, feed, & NNTP client. On 2007 July 25, Mitchell Baker, the MoCo President, posted an Email Call to Action and announced that:

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

In the 131+ comments to Mitchell's post and in lots and lots of other places, people are speculating about why MoCo decided to do this. My first thought was that this was about money because MoCo is a for-profit entity and Thunderbird does not bring in much, if any, revenue, especially compared to the millions of dollars that Firefox brings in. But, after thinking about it more and reading Mitchell's 5+ followup posts in her blog, I think that the main reason is that Thunderbird and traditional email clients in general are dying. I even posted about this myself in comp.mail.imap on July 24 and 25, before I knew anything about this letting-Thunderbird-fly plan. Here is an excerpt of my July 24 post:

. . . my guess is that [Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft] will not [support IMAP]. My prediction is that they will support annotating messages and that will be another step towards the death of IMAP . . .

And here is an excerpt of my July 25 post:

> What would replace [IMAP] ? Maybe something proprietary but with an "open API", or maybe APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), or . . .

My subconscious has known that traditional email was dying for awhile, as you can see in these 2006 blog posts and this 2005 blog post (where I said that the Web 2.0 messaging "world doesn't really care about IMAP or SMTP"), but it was only during the last few days that I realized that the old SMTP+POP+IMAP way of doing email is truly dead. And that explains why there exists no good SMTP+POP+IMAP client and why no one is working on producing one [*].

For more about this, see the blogs that link to Mitchell's Email Call to Action and the del.icio.us Thunderbird tag.

To send feedback to Mozilla about this, post a comment in Mitchell's blog or use the mozilla.org feedback system.

[*] Except for the University of Washington C&C, but if the UW were serious about producing a good usable SMTP+POP+IMAP client, they would use some of their $100,000 MATC award to hire a user-interface expert to fix the Alpine (formerly Pine) sucky user interface.