My favorite pearl of wisdom from that talk: The best thing about JavaScript is that there have been no new design mistakes since 1999 (when spec was last updated).

In addition to being highly knowledgeable (Brendan Eich called him the Yoda of Lambda Programming and JavaScript, he “discovered” JSON) he’s also entertaining, funny, and thought provoking.

In this video, after about 10-12 minutes of broad background on why the fundamental nature of security on the web is broken, he dives into the specific problem of mashups, the same origin policy in JavaScript, the global namespace and shared DOM, and suggests a method for using Google Gears to craft a solution.

Not sure how valuable the slides will be in the absence of my commentary on them, but here they are:

• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (4.3MB, in ODP format for OpenOffice)
• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (3.3MB, in PDF format)

Thanks to those who attended and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

Tim O’Reilly interviewed Dave Morin from Facebook – they’re building on a LAMP stack, and have contributed some things back, but clearly the main core of facebook is not an open source project.

His basic response was that “We will continue to release as much as we can, when it makes sense.”

Two reasons why it might not make sense came up:

1. The functionality the code offers is so tied to your services as to not be useful to outside folks
2. The codebase isn’t mature or professional quality enough – not “ready” to be released

For example, he said “we want to make sure that when we release something it is something of value, and something that the community can use.”

Then O’Reilly interviewed Mike Shaver from Mozilla, along with Matt Gertner from AllPeers and Garrett Camp from StumbleUpon, talking about the Firefox platform for extensions.

The Mozilla approach, as I suppose one would expect, is entirely different: release everything.

We don’t provide a tightly controlled API we let people access a lot. If you write an extension, it is as though you were writing code in the browser itself.
What we did was we gave people possibility.
What you get with source access is a very rich, and sometimes messy, set of points of contact with the overall platform.

I wish O’Reilly had gone further down the path of this question. Rather than deciding on behalf of the community which pieces they are likely to find valuable, Firefox takes the approach of allowing the community to determine what is valuable. Rather than waiting for code to be “mature” to release it, they let the community help make it mature.

It’s the difference between a platform designed to be extensible – which really means developers can write applications to run on our platform, as in Facebook, and designing a platform to be an open platform for anyone to do anything.

Is the difference just that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit community, and Facebook a for-profit company?

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

In parallel, a group of developers working on open source PHP projects have created GoPHP5, a site and community of projects all of which have agreed to drive PHP5 adoption. In order to be listed on the site, the project must:

Make an announcement on your site that by February 5, 2008 you will accept PHP 5.2 features into your codebase and will no longer provide support for lesser PHP versions. (versions or branches of your software already released by that date may continue support for older versions; this resolution applies only to new development.)

The idea is that unless a certain critical mass of key projects begins to require PHP 5, most shared web hosts won’t upgrade the version of PHP they make available to their users. Because the web hosts still run PHP 4, the developers of PHP projects still have to support PHP 4 – but so long as the developers continue to support PHP 4 there is no incentive for the hosting providers to upgrade:

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

WordPress, however, is not (and will not be) one of the projects on this particular PHP bandwagon. Ticket #4591 has been marked closed, wontfix:

This has been brought up probably half a dozen times, and our position is the same.

* PHP5 does not yet have sufficient penetration. On many hosts where it is available, it is not the default.
* We’re not going to turn WordPress into a protest piece at the expense of our users.
* We’re not going to set a date for the end of PHP4 support when there is no evidence to suggest that the hosting landscape will be any different on that date.

Matt Mullenweg also weighed in on the issue on his blog, arguing that:

Now the PHP core team seems to have decided that the boost their failing product needs is to kill off their successful one instead of asking the hard questions: What was it that made PHP 4 so successful? What are we doing to emphasize those strengths? Why wasn’t PHP 5 compelling to that same audience? Are the things we’re doing in PHP 6 crucial to our core audience or simply “good” language problems to solve? Will they drive adoption? How can we avoid releasing (another) PCjr?

(Tell us how you really feel, Matt.)

While I can understand the desire of the GoPHP5 folks to encourage web hosts to make available new language features, I have to say ultimately Matt’s right on this one. Explicitly choosing not to provide support to a group of users in order to force adoption of a new version is putting the cart (developer interests) before the horse (user needs).

That said, how can the PHP community get PHP5 more broadly deployed? (And deployed as the default at hosts which need to provide support for both 4 and 5, which will be the case at many shared hosts)? What do you do when the older version is successful people don’t see a good reason to migrate to the newer version?

I remember the bad old days of Netscape Navigator 4.x, and how terribly long it took for the number of users on NN 4.x to reach a low enough level that they could be “unsupported” from a web development point of view. Ajax would never have taken off so widely as a technique had it not been so easy to talk about supporting “All major browsers, 5.x or later” – dropping the old Netscape stack and supporting only Mozilla based browsers (and that MS thing). But that happened more or less accidentally – no one continued to develop NN 4.x as the company failed, and new and more compelling options (Firefox, Safari, Opera) appeared.

How do we get beyond PHP4 without leaving users behind?

More generally, how do you crank the adoption cycle to move faster, without forcing end-of-life?

Ubuntu‘s LTS releases “will be supported with security updates for 5 years on the server and 3 years on the desktop” – part of a deliberate strategy to reduce user’s risk of obsolescence and increase adoption of Linux. But PHP5 is already three years old – PHP4 was launched in May of 2000!

(Update: Just coincidentally came across this: 4 Years Ago Today – Netscape Corporation Killed, Mozilla Foundation Born. – I thought netscape’s death was even longer ago than 4 years. How quickly time flies).

If you haven’t taken a look at the Democracy Player itself, you really should. Think of Democracy Player as an alternative to Joost : an open source, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) video player and download client which can handle video podcasts / vodcasts as well as bit torrent downloads. It’s also open in terms of content, and the channels which can be made available. It is soon to be renamed to “Miro” – in anticipation of the 1.0 release.

As the project page explains, the Democracy Player is not only a better player for its users, but also better for the ecosystem of the internet:

Television is the most powerful medium in our culture, and it’s moving online. There’s a huge opportunity to hear new voices. But if video on the internet is dominated by just one or two huge video websites, we’re all in serious trouble. Openness, competition, and decentralization make the internet work. We need to ensure that online video has that same freedom.

Democracy Player keeps online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers, all in one place. Don’t get locked in to one video host.

However, now that I’ve installed and used it for a bit, I can validate this is not a joke. Apple’s Safari browser, version 3 beta, is available for Windows XP and Vista.

• Put users into plug-in hell.
• Create Web ghettos.
• Don’t provide accessibility.
• Make search a pain.

It’s a great beginning to a real debate about the place of technologies like Silverlight that many others have been fawning over.

He doesn’t mention one that I would add:

• Require users to accept closed, proprietary software. You can have a completely Free/Libre experience of using the web, until you hit Flash / Silverlight content, which cannot be accessed in a pure open stack, and may never be ported to Linux (Flash Player has finally been ported to Linux – no word on Silverlight).

My only nit to pick is that Apollo’s really not the target here so much as Flash itself is – Apollo’s really about extending web apps (which can be in Flash or Ajax) to the desktop. (The media loves an opportunity to put Adobe up against Microsoft – and painting Silverlight as going up against Flash would require acknowledging how long Flash has been in use).

That said, similar criticisms can be extended, since Apollo only deepens the distinction between those who have it and those who don’t, and extends the life of Flash as a web-delivery mechanism.

This week, add Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.1 and Dynamic Languages Runtime to the mix alongside Adobe’s Flex SDK.

Jeff Gould argues that open source has “jumped the shark,” and that:

the magical words “open source” have come to function as the software equivalent of carbon offsets. . . . some software vendors are cleverer than others, and have learned to buy indulgences for their sinful profit-craving ways by selectively building open source components into their stack. . . . Their own software remains every bit as proprietary as the Microsoft products they compete with.

Interestingly, his argument comes the same day that Microsoft announces the Dynamic Language Runtime at MIX 07.

The DLR will enable developers to code .NET applications in Python, Ruby and other dynamic languages to come (alongside JavaScript and VisualBasic) in addition to C# and VB.NET.

Adding in Silverlight 1.1, which will be a browser plug-in, this means that “developers building browser-based applications can now use their preferred language even for client-side code.”

How does this relate to Gould’s argument? The DLR, along with IronPython and IronRuby, will be made available under the Microsoft Permissive License, which they characterize as their “BSD-style” license. (For now code is available as part of IronPython ).

What isn’t clear is what this will mean in terms of deploying applications. Silverlight so far has only been described as “cross-platform” – and a specific version of cross-platform at that. As Gavin Clarke notes in his reporting from MIX 07:

. . . while Silverlight works in Safari, Firefox, and Mac versions 10.4.8 or higher on PowerPC and Intel in addition to Internet Explorer and Windows, support for Linux and Opera – to name just two other popular alternatives – is missing, with little prospect of support coming from Microsoft

In other words, you can develop with whatever dynamic languages you like, so long as you are working on a .NET platform. You can even deploy those dynamic language applications to browsers, so long as it is IE or Firefox on windows or Safari for Mac OS X, and using the Silverlight 1.1 plugin, which itself may or may not be open source.

(Elizabeth Montalbana at IDG says here that “Microsoft will release the source code to part of its Silverlight technology at MIX 07 this week,” but the Silverlight site merely says “Microsoft will make the Silverlight browser plug-in freely available for all supported platforms.” It looks to me like some of the DLR will be under the Microsoft Permissive License, but not the Silverlight plug-in itself).

This resembles / echoes Adobe’s recent move to open source parts of the Flex SDK, and portions of the ActionScript interpreter used in the Flash plug-in, but without opening the key portions of Flex (Flex Data Services, for example) and without opening the Flash player itself. (As well as not open sourcing Apollo, though they have promised Linux support at some future date).

While I think it will be interesting for .NET based developers who want the ability to flex their Ruby or Python skills on the platform on which they arleady develop, I don’t see any vast migration of open source developers into the Redmond camp, any more than I see Adobe’s gestures in the direction of open source moving those accustomed to open source ajax frameworks and libraries.

In fact, perhaps this becomes a way to expose even more .NET developers to joys of Ruby on Rails, Slingshot and Django.

Related posts:

• Talking Ruby and Dynamic Language Support with John Lam (Video, at Port25)
• Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support (video, at Port 25)
• Mix ’07′s Sleeper Announcement: Cross-platform CLR
• Silverlight Glow Dimmed by Cross Platform Concerns
• Mix 07, Silverlight, Dynamic Language Runtime, and Open Source (Miguel de Icaza)
• Microsoft Adds Open-Source Twist to Silverlight
• A conversation with John Lam (Jon Udell) points out that the DRL-based Ruby can’t run Rails
• At Mix07, is Microsoft bottom-trolling for developers with weak knees?
• Silly Season – wonderful rant at Dive Into Mark about Silverlight and Apollo

Today Joyent announced the public release of Slingshot, a framework for (their words) obliterating the distinction between the web and the desktop.

Slingshot lets developers take Ruby-on-Rails applications and deploy them to desktops (Windows, Mac OS X).

Is it just me, or does the red rock in the slingshot graphic look a bit like the Adobe Apollo logo? Ok, so maybe not a direct version of the logo, but certain the Adobe Apollo red.

Is this a cheaper faster way to get to sent to the moon and back, or just another David vs. Goliath myth?

More on Slingshot, including a quick tour.

Although I am certainly happy to see Adobe moving in the direction of open source, it is good to more closely at the overall picture: what is being open sourced and what is not, which is exactly what Burnette does.

I guess it’s really just a question of “getting it” relative to others. The Flash player is still a closed platform, but at least it is available for Linux, unlike Silverlight.

</update>
—
Adobe seems increasingly to “get it” when it comes to enabling the modern web application environment, leveraging the strengths of the Flash player on all those dekstops, and allowing enough openness for creativity to flourish.

The latest example of which is the announcement this morning that they have open sourced the Flex SDK – compiler, libraries, and all. (Everything but the Eclipse-based IDE, which remains under a commercial license).

In the following video from the PodTech network, Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani discuss the announcement with Robert Scoble:

Related links:

• Adobe to Open Source Flex (Adobe Labs)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (press release at Yahoo! Finance)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (at John Newton’s Content Log)

He’s posted a video of the talk he gave at the expo: “Creating Offline Web Applications Within the Browser.” It describes in quite a bit of detail how to use the Dojo Offline Toolkit to enable offline use of Ajax applications.

If you’re not looking for the tech details I still think the first 15-20 minutes is worth watching as he outlines why you might want offline web applications and what characteristics a good framework should provide for such apps.

Today, TechCrunch announced “Zimbra Desktop to Launch: Full Offline Functionality” – saying the launch will be announced “later this week.”

The alpha appears to be available already: Zimbra on your Desktop.

According to TechCrunch:

Zimbra Desktop will be available cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and cross browser (Firefox, IE, Safari). The Zimbra web application and all user data is stored on the client computer (the database is Apache Derby). Data is synced real time when in online mode.

Zimbra Desktop does not include drag and drop functionality into the browser (for, say, dragging an attachment into an email), although the company says it will be included in a future release.

All Zimbra source code, including Zimbra Desktop, is open source – I expect other web developers to be taking a close look at how they are architecting things.

They’re using Apache Derby to store data client side and then synchronize/replicate with the server.

This may be just the nudge I need to finally leave Thunderbird behind altogether – right now I use Zimbra when connected and then Thunderbird to pull down mail so I can have it when offline.

At AjaxWorld this week, I was amazed at the number of solutions for creating Rich Internet Applications. On the Open Source front, the usual suspects (libraries, frameworks, languages and tools) were mentioned:

• Dojo
• Prototype / Scriptaculous
• DWR
• Yahoo! UI Library
• Google Web Toolkit
• Symfony
• Zend Framework
• JSON
• The Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework
• OpenAjax Alliance
• OpenLaszlo
• Tibco GI (which went open source a few months back).

This is by no means a complete list of open source Ajax frameworks and applications – just those I heard mentioned or presented on at AjaxWorld. (Did no one mention JQuery?)

There were also a few “professional open source” solutions with companies behind them that were new to me:

• ICESoft Technologies – which releases ICEfaces in an open source version (MPL 1.1) and an Enterprise Production Suite version. They also make client side technology: ICEbrowser, ICEreader, and ICEpdf which can be evaluated but are not open source.
• Thinwire, an LGPL development framework for J2EE applications
  
• Helmi, a GPLv2 client framework

But there were also a number of proprietary solutions:

• Adobe Flex / Flash / Apollo
• Microsoft WPF / WPFe (they were not a sponsor, but mentioned in many presentations)
• JackBe
• BackBase
• Nexaweb
• Kapow
• Servoy
• Infragistics
• Telerik

And a lot of people raised as either a concern or a hope (depending on how you see things) the increasing presence of especially Adobe and Microsoft in terms of rich, web-based applications with increased drawing/animation/media handling capabilities.

A couple recent ruminations on the subject:

• The Open Web: What’s at Stake (Brendan Eich’s presentation at SXSW)
• The Open Web and its Adversaries (Brendan’s blog post about the presentation and open-ness)
• Brendan Eich on Mozilla and the Future of AJAX (Dare Obasanjo reacting to Brendan, arguing that openness is a “red herring” in the debate, which should be focused purely on the best technology)
• Rich application engines and user innovation (Jon Udell, who sees a need to bring web affordances like indexing and linking to video and rich formats)

And recent releases of note:

• OpenLaszlo 4.0 released: outputs to Flash or Ajax from the same codebase
• Adobe Apollo Alpha released: currently Windows and Mac OS X only – support for Linux in “future versions.”
• Forthcoming: FireFox 3.0

My take: we need to preserve as much as possible the open-ness that has made the web successful. That said, there may be some cases where a bit of proprietary-company-driven innovation helps raise the bar – after all, XMLHttpRequest was originally a non-standard Microsoft invention.

If those proprietary companies can find ways to make their innovations available to all (available in the sense of API level access and open standards, not just free like the Flash player is free) they will be welcome additions.

If they try to lock developers and consumers into a closed model, they will ultimately fail.

Just my $0.02.

The slides are available here:

• Building a Business Case for Ajax Applications (odp – Open Document Presentation)
• Building a Business Case fo Ajax Applications (pdf – Portable Document Format)
• Building a Business Case for Ajax Applications (ppt – PowerPoint Format)

If you’re not familiar with Apollo, it is a cross-platform (purportedly Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) application which will run applications developed using HTML & Ajax as well as Flex/Flash applications: a rich internet application container of sorts. It’ll also understand the PDF format and be able to open PDF documents.

The interesting challenge, I think, is whether Apollo, or something like it, could replace the web browser as the fundamental container for internet applications. (A corollary question: if it could, would that be a good thing?)
As a desktop application, the Apollo container can add access to the local file system, as well as a mature model for online/offline connectivity (for applications to function in partially connected mode). Apollo could also offer the application developer more control over the “chrome” or “skin,” which browsers have traditionally kept under user control.

However, it seems like a step backward to revert to the application container model when the web browser has been doing quite well, thank you. Installing the Flash plugin is one thing, but having in essence a flash-plugin-on-steroids that can also do HTML and Ajax starts to seem like a web browser replacement. Do we need another?

Will users find the additional functionality of Apollo apps compelling enough to run them alongside the browser?

Unfortunately the beta release is now said to be early 2007 – they used to say late 2006. So we’ll have to wait and see. (Maybe they need to open source the whole thing so we can get it on schedule – it is using WebKit already).
You can sign up to be notified when the beta is released, or get more info about Apollo at Adobe Labs.

(Kevin Lynch was also on Talk Crunch December 16 2006: Here Comes Apollo – at which point he said Apollo would run first on Windows and Mac, then they would work on Linux after Flash Player 9 was done.)

One immediate annoyance was the way Cingular/Samsung have configured the JBlend Java Virtual Machine on the phone. That had to go, or the phone was going back to the store.

First, the background.

On a vanilla BlackJack from Cingular, when you install java mobile applications like Opera Mini, Google Maps, or Gmail, they have to ask for user permission every single time they need to make a network request.

The options you’re given when the application asks are:

• Allow and ask me next time
• Don’t allow this time
• Don’t allow for this session

The missing option, of course, is: Allow for this session. (Or even, allow and don’t ever ask me again for this app – which I’d be happy with).

Second, the solution.

Thanks to IBM, this thread on Google Groups, this thread at HowardForums and this post at MS Mobiles, there is a way around.

In essence, this involves installing IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Microenvironment, an alternative JVM capable of running J2ME applications conforming to the MIDP 2.0 spec.

The easiest way is to use one of the J9.cab files, from the Howard Forums thread or here.

In addition, you need to copy the tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf fonts from a Windows machine into the \Windows\Fonts directory on your BlackJack. I found that Opera Mini didn’t work otherwise.

Using one of the .cab files rather than IBM’s default mechanism for installing includes adjustments to font paths, as described in the Google Groups thread, and has the added benefit of making the association between .jad and .jar files and J9, so from now on you can install Java apps just as you would with the default JBlend JVM. Finally, it installs an icon for the J9 as an application in the menu, rather than having to dig down into File Explorer to get to the new JVM.

Initial reports that Microsoft was trying to “patent RSS” turn out to be at best over-simplified.

At issue isn’t RSS itself, or an RSS reader, or feed publisher. What’s at issue is the way that RSS is handled in Vista, and in the combination of IE7 and Vista.

Nick Bradbury, in “Clarifying Microsoft’s RSS-related Patents,” does a great job of explaining the two key areas where Microsoft seems to believe it has something unique:

1. Content syndication platform: describes the Windows RSS Platform, which is built into IE7/Vista and was announced at Gnomedex 2005 three days after the patent was filed. This platform exposes an API which enables applications to access the user’s shared feed subscriptions, providing object-oriented methods for reading, adding, deleting and updating feeds regardless of their format.
2. Finding and consuming web subscriptions in a web browser: describes an API and user interface for discovering and exposing RSS feeds to other applications (specifically web browsers).

In other words, they’re trying to patent the mechanisms built into Vista for centralizing user RSS subscription information in the host OS, and then making it available to other applications running on the system.

And this is supposed to make me feel better? Oh, all they’re trying to do is take RSS feed information out of the browser and RSS reader and store them centrally, in the OS.
I’m with Steve Borsch at Connecting the Dots, who writes in “Microsoft RSS Patent Update: Manipulate, Maneuver and Morph“:

I’m instantly suspect of an RSS engine patent — with the sweeping scope of this one — which is clearly a process patent intended to “own” not the RSS protocol…but most of the ways it will be used.

So if Microsoft is successful in this patent application, will it be covered by the agreement with Novell?

Given that MS no longer develops IE for the Mac, is Apple working on a centralized feed consumption service in OS X?

Basically, you install the plug-in in your copy of IE, and sign in to the Weezu servers. Then, while you browse the web, Weezu “watches” what urls you are visiting, and informs you when other Weezu users are looking at the same pages.

In other words, you can see which other Weezu users (those who also installed the plug-in and created a Weezu account) are viewing the same page you are.

In Weezu’s terms (are they using Google Babelfish for the English version?):

Thanks to the Weezu bar, you can see the avatars of all weezunauts who are connected on the same site as you are, and with a single click start to share messages with them. To achieve this, you only need to install the Weezu bar. Once connected on Internet, you will see the avatars of weezunauts visiting the web sites. Weezu works on all web sites around the world and maybe further…

One of the issues I had with Weezu is the design.

I suppose one could argue design is subjective, but who exactly is the target market for a service which looks like this?:

This is what the Weezu plug-in looks like when it is open – here there is only the user’s avatar because no other weezunauts are visiting the same page at the same time.

Why is the user’s avatar inside the mouth of a giant blue sea monster, hovering near the sea floor in some kind of spongebob squarepants alternate universe? I assume that’s the “Weezuscaphe.”

If you should happen to find another weezunaut, you’ll have the opportunity for a chat:

(I should mention these images are drawn from the Weezu “use” page – I did install and try it out but I never managed to find anyone on the same page as me at the same time).

Other weezunauts’ avatars appear at the left, and by clicking on them you can send them messages.

Why? That’s not entirely clear. Perhaps you want to talk to strangers about the web pages you’re both looking at?

Reminds me a bit of ThirdVoice, which allowed users to leave comments “on” web pages that other Third Voice users would be able to see – except with a synchronous twist, in that the users are there now, or something close to it.

The second issue I had with Weezu is that it’s an IE only experience at this point – though they are working on a firefox version.

Finally, they’ll have an interesting challenge managing the growth of their community.

When it is too small, as it is now, you can’t find any other avatars – you’re just crawling along the bottom of the sea floor all by your lonesome, ” . . . a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

When it gets too big, if it were to catch on among some niche set of users for example, the interface would be overwhelmed by users – at which point it becomes clear that this is just a chat room circa 1996, and plain old IRC might be more effective. It will quickly become “so crowded nobody goes there anymore.”

(OK, did I just manage to quote T.S. Eliot and Yogi Berra in one blog post?)

It might get interesting if, for example, I could set up friend lists – and determine who I might want to chat with if they happened upon the same page. Or, if sites endorsed use of such a plug-in, and made the experience of chatting somehow related to the experience of the site.

Another similar startup in invite-only mode, is Me.dium, which “reveals the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser.” According to Ajaxian, Me.dium offers some similar functionality: “You can see your friends browsing, all with relevance letting you know who is doing similar things, and letting you chat with those people.” I’ve just installed that one, will blog more about it once I’ve tried it out.

Internet Explorer 7.0 was officially released last week, for Windows XP (and Windows Server 2003). (Finally, tabbed browsing and RSS feeds awareness . . . ).

Today Firefox 2.0 will be released. It’s already on the download servers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. (I’ve linked to en-us for all the above, but if you follow the download server link it is pretty simple to get other localized versions).

Now if only there were a way to push out Firefox as effectively as MS will be able to push out IE 7 under “automatic updates . . . “