PHP and MySQL are loosing the plot?

MySQL 5.0 release candidate is out with goodies such as stored procedures and such.

Goodies?

Mysql is trying to emulate Oracle. I see the same thing happening with PHP. It's is trying more and more to emulate JAVA et all and trying to get acceptance in the "enterprise". Zend's site is all about the "enterprise". And that's all wrong!

Meanwhile, things like Ruby on Rails are stealing PHP's lead in easy and fast web development. I heard a talk by a Google engineer trying to convince a MySQL crowd that they shouldn't try to emulate Oracle, they should try to shoot higher than that and become the next web OS database. I don't think the MySQL guys got it. That's always the problem with a lot of open source software - they emulate leaders - they don't lead themselves. Open office is the same - sure, they copy Microsoft Office. But MS Office is much more usable than OO - always a generation or two ahead. At least last time I checked (a few months ago).

Anyway, back to PHP-MySQL. The dynamic duo. Are they loosing the plot by trying to be "enterprise" friendly, instead of focussing on fast and cheerful web2.0-style development? I worry. Discuss.

looking for Firefox extension hacker

I need to find someone who can hack together a small firefox extension for a (very cool I think myself) project I'm doing.

I haven't been able to find out where to find someone. Email to peter van dijck at google's email system (you can piece this email address together, right? No spaces.) I can pay you some $$, not too much. I'm a big believer in browser-based stuff, and I want to start playing with some ideas I have for Mefeedia. This is something you should be able to put together in a weekend or two...

remote teams

I always assumed that "communication problems" with remote teams were mostly about culture and the difficulty of explaining stuff when you're not standing next to someone. But I'm learning it's also simply about the electricity going down or your phone battery running out.

Videoblogs go mainstream in Hollywood

I saw this ad today - notice the link to the director's videoblog.

All the cool directors are making videoblogs. Peter Jackson makes videos about the production of King Kong, the Blue Tights network is a videoblog by the one and only Superman. I couldn't find the ad again after making the screenshot though, and no Google love for David Rodenberg's videoblog. It's probably behind a Flash wall or something.

I stumbled accross Steve Krug's Don't make me think, second edition in a bookstore the other day, an it's still brilliant. One of the few must-have books on web design. A true classic. Buy one for everyone in your team, including your boss.

The ability to roll out cool stuff efficiently

I am trying to grow my ability to roll out cool stuff quickly.

If you're developing projects for yourself, that's the number one thing you need. The 37sig guys have a lot of good ideas for that. Joelonsoftware has a lot of good ideas. What I like about them is that they are not afraid to go against "common wisdom" in software development. 37sig doesn't do specs. That's scary. And so on.

But I'm finding that there are many ways to do software development. Here's one: I am working with a team in India. No idea if this is going to work - I've worked with overseas teams before and I'm well aware of the risks. I'll report back later - can you roll out cool stuff fast working with a team in India, or will you get bogged down in communications/spec problems and misunderstandings? We'll find out.

Anyway, back to this post. I spent this week working on my ability to roll out cool stuff fast. I'm working with a team, so I needed CVS. That's installed now. I was getting painful wrists from all the typing, so I bought a computer desk today that is ergonomically better than the table I was working on. Check. I've set up my local development environment - http://mefeedia.peter. Working fine. I learnt to work with PHPDocumentor. No idea how much that'll help my ability to roll out cool stuff fast - I'll report back on that too.

What else? I have gathered the names and tels of a bunch of people willing to do usability tests. And I've set up a way to do remote testing. So I'll start doing that too. Test the competition. Test my designs. I'm gonna do half a day of testing every week we develop. Will report back.

I'm off now. I'm gonna hang a bunch of stuff on the wall. So I can roll out cool stuff faster.

(Other stuff I'm trying is: Backpack, IM, mailing lists, ...)

83 Degrees | web2.0 software. For god's sake! How 2.0 Cool Site Compliant can you get? I'm getting so sick of tags, ajax, numbers in domain names and all that superficial shit companies pull (me included) to come across as web 2.0. Jeeses.

Simon Willison is working for Yahoo!. They're really hiring some good people there, waw.

peterme.com: Final Thoughts - AIGA Boston: "Form-makers, while valuable, are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends. And these form-makers, it is clear, have no idea."

I hope IA's can escape becoming commoditized. The good thing is that what we do (play with categories is as good a definition as any) is inherently strategic, because categories are so powerful. If only IA's would realize the power they hold.

I also do feel that usability people have let themselves fall into the same trap. I know this isn't fair to a lot of people who are doing good work, but as a profession they don't seem to have advanced much beyond just fixing existing problems.

Joho the Blog: Yahoo vs. Google: Who's the Chinese government's very best buddy?: "But someone in Yahoo got a list of search terms the Chinese want blocked. They looked down the list and saw "Tiananmen Massacre," "Dalai Lama," "Falun Gong," and maybe "democracy." "Yup," this person thought, "Our product can do that. No problemo." Thus Yahoo wrote into its code the repressive values of the Chinese government."

When values get embedded in infrastructure (as they often are), they become almost invisible and hard to catch.

Mefeedia in Businessweek's Best of the Web

I'm quite honored to be listed (for Mefeedia.com, my video project) together with sites like Wikipedia, Flickr and the likes in an article by Businessweek in the Editors picks for the Best of the Web.

Businessweek has a special: It's A Whole New Web: "And this time, it's Your Web. No longer content to be merely viewers and consumers, people increasingly are taking an active part in creating their online lives.
[...]
At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software."

Indeed. And this is where it gets interesting: "Media and entertainment companies, which have profited by becoming gatekeepers, sit right in the crosshairs of Web do-it-yourselfers."

There are some amazing sites I hadn't heard of. "An average of 6.2 million photos are uploaded to Cyworld each day". Holy shit. That's what happens when cellphones really kick in.

Innovation keeps coming out of the videoblogging community: we're now using a P2P app to gather raw videos of an event into a "press pool" that can then be remixed by others. Apperceptions: Vlog Europe Press Pool

The new Yahoo mail interface looks (and supposedly feels) exactly like my desktop mail app.

Google search: good enough?

Technorati Weblog: Welcome to the Blogosphere, Google!: "I welcome the competition. We've got some tricks up our sleeves too."

You have to admire a company that is brave enough to take on Google in search, of all things.

I wonder though, Google's big advantage is the server infrastructure they've built up. They know scaling better than almost anyone on the planet.

There is no doubt in my mind that Technorati's search is superior to Google, but they are having serious scaling problems. Google doesn't have to be better, in fact they can be worse than Technorati and still win, if they're just Good Enough and Fast. Technorati is better than good enough, but not fast. Which is a problem.

This reminds of of Bloglines. The weird thing with Bloglines is that they have lots of crazy features (have your own blog, a great API, ...) but I bet that 90% of their users use them only for one thing: reading blogs. They got that right.

I have the same problem speccing the next release of Mefeedia. Coming up with lots and lots of cool features is easy. Way easy. But finding the real value in a video aggregator and nailing that is much harder. Perhaps sites have to just develop stuff and some of it will stick? Flickr started as something quite different from what it is now, the photosharing sticked so they went with that.

IA's should program and build cool shit.

A lot of my friends are information architects and designers with great ideas, about strategy, usability, business, you name it. Itching to make some cool shit after years of consulting. But when I talk to them, they often lack the ability to efficiently bootstrap stuff, because they're used to working with teams of coders who implement for them. They are reluctant to build stuff themselves. (With "they" I mean "me".)

A startup with a bright idea doesn't have teams of coders though. You gotta build stuff yourself. At least the first prototype. Bootstrap it.

Which is why I've decided to learn how to program. Again. I've been using the same skills I had 5 years ago to build my cool shit, and it's not enough anymore. That, and the idea that programming is as important a skill in the ability to roll out cool stuff as strategy/usability/... are.

So I'm trying to convince my designer/IA friends. Learn how to program. It's scary, if you're 30-something. But sit down for a month and just do it.

video schmipod by November 9th?

This week's Apple hype (the phone and stuff) was pretty dissapointing.

Today, I followed a random ad somewhere (yeah), and found this page:

Do they know something that we don't?

I am still a big believer in the video ipod - Apple's not gonna give away that market to Sony's PSP without a batlle, but they want a big splash and the market isn't ready yet. Maybe in a few months? These things go fast. And will Mefeedia then have an ipod mode, to route around that fairly fucked up Apple directory?

Don't buy those christmas presents just yet :)

Intel's anthropological army - ZDNet UK Insight: "And we looked at cultural groupings in London, Tokyo and Los Angeles, because we wanted to know whether there were greater similarities between people in those environments than differences. So we looked at 22 to 34 year old women, and there were great similarities. But then we checked women in Brazil, and there was a huge difference. Technology is a matter of life and death in big cities in Brazil, literally. Mobile phones were given to children, so they could be kept track of. But you don't take out a laptop in public, because you risked bodily harm from someone willing to steal it. Yet home computers were fantastic, because they kept the kids inside and engaged instead of being at risk outside."

God, this stuff always fascinates. My girlfriend is doing ethnographic research (the real stuff) in NYC these days - amazing.

start.com is a good idea (letting me create my own startpage was always a good idea), executed better than, say, my yahoo and such. It's got lots of nifty ajaxy interaction, and some nice ideas. But still.. not quite there yet. It just doesn't let me create the page I really want easily. If someone can crack this problem (I'm not sure it can be done), I'm sure they'd be very popular. Let me create my own homepage ridicilously easy. We'll see where they go with this. It's good to see innovation coming out of MSN again.

craigblog: Katrina survivors need 'net access: "due to the seeming lack of computing facilities arranged for the neediest victims at the shelters -- 40 computer stations for 10,000 victims at the astrodome seems grossly inadequate -- and are wondering what else is being done to give victims internet access so that they can connect with the many thousands of amazingly generous US citizens who are looking to do what our government seemingly cannot, at least in a timely fashion."

All the talk about setting up cybercafes and such seems naive to me. Here's an idea, which would be logistically hard enough but should still be doable: why doesn't someone close to the disaster and with a printer PRINT OUT ads like these from craigslist and hands them out in places where people gather?

I just came to Belgium, so I thought I'd share the European word on the street about the Katrina events.

"I'm not sending money - why should I? So they can use it to wage war in Iraq? And Bush said on TV they don't need any help."

"They're shooting at their own people! Unbelievable! They said on the news that the military knows when they're allowed to shoot."

"The planes with help are waiting in the Belgian airport, but they haven't gotten permission from the US governement yet."

"Their governement doesn't take care of its people. No pension, no healthcare, now this."

"Imagine being a soldier in Iraq if you are from that area! When you should be helping out at home."

"It took Bush 2 days before he went to visit the area! When anything happens here, the prime minister and the king are there within hours."

We all feel for the victims, but the way this is being handled is quite unbelievable.

Sifry's Alerts: Performance and Scalability improvement progress report #2: "there's over 1.4 Million new posts every day, and about 22% of those posts are from spam or fake blogs"

iPod video?

Speculation is everywhere: will Apple will introduce a video ipod? And now Apple is cranking up the buzzmachine again. "The company sent an invitation to reporters on Monday morning for a "special event" being held Sept. 7 in San Francisco. "1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," the invitation reads, referring to the release of the first 5GB iPod nearly four years ago. "Here we go again." It will be a video device, but not exactly video ipod. A different device that does video, not music. It needs a large screen. Which means get rid of that famous scrollwheel.

• Apple won't give the portable video market, no matter how small, away to Sony's PSP.
• It won't be an existing iPod shell with video capabilities, because that would just suck. Dissapointment would abound. Video on that tiny screen? It needs a big screen.
• The device will have a large screen, and will connect with iTunes 5 which will let you buy video and subscribe to video RSS feeds (iTunes 4.9 already lets you subscribe to video feeds).

Something like this? Somehow that mockup just doesn't seem right. Not.. revolutionary enough. Unlike the PSP, the video ipod probably won't be loaded with features (wireless, gaming, you name it, the PSP does it). That's not the Apple way. It will do 1 thing (video), and it will do it well. Very well. The big advantage it will have should be its connection to the iTunes video store. If Jobs can pull off deals with enough television shows, movies and such, and present all that video available through the store, that might be an announcement that will wow people in the Apple tradition. Anyway, enough speculation. They might just come out with something completely different.

How many videobloggers are there? Ask Vlogstats.

After nagging about Jason's nagging, I have to admit his post on webOS is brilliant. GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? (kottke.org)

Jason Kottke: "News.com ruminates about Google building a collection of tools that serve as a replacement OS. Where have we heard that recently? You're welcome for the story idea and thanks for the non-link, guys...tech journalism at its finest. I hereby institute a policy of not linking to you for a year."

Jeez. Jason, sure you're an A-list blogger but I don't think you can take the credit for the "Google OS" idea (I don't think any on person can). Nag nag nag.

Hosting beyond the call of duty

EMAIL: Dreamhost to me: "I had to add indexes to several of your mefeedia_live tables because they
were *really* bad."

Now that is beyond the fucking call of duty for a hosting service.

No wonder they're out of dedicated servers until December. I've been with Dreamhost a few months now and I love them. I love them as much as my morning coffee. Their servers are zippy. Their support is good, and they know what they're doing. They add indexes to your tables! And it's a great deal if you have some small sites to host (and even if you have big ones, although they are growing fast and out of dedicated servers right now).

(Disclaimer: I get a bonus if you sign up through the link on this post, but that's now why I recommend them. They add freaking indexes to your tables! Now you might think, I don't want some sysadmin adding indexes to my tables. But if your tables were as bad as mine, you would.)

And: if anyone knows of another host with managed dedicated servers I can use with similar prices (US$ 2-300/month), please recommend.

The Doc Searls Weblog : How to Save the Web from Splogonoma. A well considered must-read about spam blogs. It has become very easy to create an automatically updated blog that harvests stuff from other blogs, and the problem is much bigger than many think.

Need some help.

Businessweek is doing a poll on the best sites of the web, and in the video category you can vote for Mefeedia.

Right. I need you now.

Vote here for whatever your heart tells you to. (Stare at this for a while first: Mefeedia)

I'd really appreciate a vote. It's a big deal. Thanks so much!

Schluck together your own list of testees.

The mefeedia usability center is a hit! It took like an hour to program together (a table and some code), and I've started collecting a great list of users willing to be usability testees. Many companies find usability testees by paying a marketing company 100$ a head, and the quality of people you get is often low. OK, I shouldn't say that. But if you want your own users to be testees, why not simply ask them? I can't believe everyone (Typepad? 37sigs?) isn't doing this. I'll start testing soon, and report back on that too.

I'm still taking more people in the program, so sign up now.

Todd asks what happened to topicmaps. They're just overkill for any project I (and probably you) have ever worked on.

Most people find usability testing to be a lot of fun (when else in your life do you get someone's total attention to whatever you have to say?) I'm starting a bunch of low budget usability tests for Mefeedia - sign up as a Mefeedia usability tester! You can be anywhere in the world for this.

What does it mean if you have a video blog log of your life, when you can look back at a specific time in your life and really see what you were doing?

"look back at your past" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Rocketboom.)

The whole burlesque thing in New York is getting out of hand ;)

Watch movie Quicktime, 4 min 13.4 MB
(Original post, via missing kitten tv)

"it's gonna be crazy" (Quicktime movie quote using Mefeedia. Original movie found at Richard BF.)

One click subscription

The Real Problem. Developers love to talk about complex problems and elegant solutions, but the easy stuff is too boring. One click subscriptions are one example.

Where are all the UK start-ups? (plasticbag.org)

Where are all the UK start-ups? (plasticbag.org). Indeed! And the Belgium ones? In Belgium, for example, startups US style (a few people come together and create a great product) are almost non-existent. It's hard to get money, it's hard to get any kind of support, you have no peers and everyone looks at you like you're crazy.

In NYC, on the other hand, a week doesn't go by where I don't have beer with people doing startups. The difference is amazing.

Sometimes you can be in NY (the Bronx here) and feel like you're in South America. Watch movie 0.8 min 2.4 MB
(Original post, via diariodeviaje)

Using video to explain features or tell stories about features

37 signals have a post today showing a video explaining features of some product. Ruby on Rails has been using video to show off the product pretty well. Since I'm working on Mefeedia, a website for videobloggers, I've given a lot of thought to the use of video.

There are various ways in which to use video. You can make videos showing off features. Great. You can be lucky enough to have users making videos to show off features (like here for Mefeedia). Even better - sometimes at least. And you can use video for more "soft" purposes, like to tell stories about your site.

For example, I made an Instant Archive feature for Mefeedia, where vloggers can put an archive of their videos with thumbnails on their site. I did it while talking to my users, and Michael shot a video when we came up with this. That's the advantage of having videobloggers as users.

The video is brilliant, really showing the foundation story of this one feature, and the enthusiasm we felt. It comes straight from the heart. It is linked from the Instant Archive page.

The 5 stages of videoblogging:Watch movie 1.2 min 5.3 MB
(Original post, via We Are The Media)

Did you encourage a videoblogger today

As the early videobloggers, we need to tell people about this, and show them. I was just encouraging a potential videoblogger, and to show them how fast it goes, here's the movie (10 mins later - Quicktime, about a meg).

Haven't videoblogged in a while. I downloaded the Ourmedia uploader and it's good. I build this Instant Archive feature on Mefeedia today, and everyone just plain loves it, and it just struck me how crazy it is that you can truly only build good things if you really, really talk to users. Here's the movie. (Quicktime, about a meg)

Video archive

This is my video archive. This page will always contain all my videos. Thumbs by Mefeedia

What services out there let you view, in real time, another computer user interact with their screen? I don't need audio - I have a phone. It needs to be low-install on the users' side. And I don't need heavy applications, all I want is to see the screen of the other user and how they interact with it. The usability applications I've seen are overspecced and expensive. Webex is expensive. Any pointers?

Joel on Software - Hitting the High Notes: "You can't afford to be number two, or to have a "good enough" product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean, so good that people remark about it."

Sometimes he slips but Joel can really - really - write.

Shelley: Snapshot in Semantic Time: "I also wish more folk would take the time to pull together the threads in a meaningful way like Peter Van Dijck did with the early semantic web discussions."

We have a long way to go in enabling better conversations with our blogging tools. And better story telling. A blog post now is text and links. That's good - especially the links. But there are many more structures that we should support, like the semantic web one I did. I had to do that manually. Or like what I was trying to support with XFML: mini structured directories that can link together. There is so much, and microformats are leading some of the way.

Of course, with video it becomes even more urgent. You can't quote a part of a video right now, except in an experimental tool at Mefeedia. It's hard to link to videos you like, because you don't have a thumbnail available, or size information, and you really want to indicate size, type and such when you link. Except at Mefeedia, where I try to make that easier. It's hard to link videos together in conversations. I'm working on that.

It's all about mixing the ideas the social research people have about helping people to structure stories and conversations, with the ideas the web people have about web 2.0, you own your data, distribution and such. That mix will make some damn powerful stuff possible. I really hope we can break the wall of big binary video files, and make them more webby. We need that in order to have the kind of conversations blogging has enabled for text.

Vlogger for hire

Hello?: JOB HUNT: Mica is looking for a position in a media, arts, advertising organization and has an impressive resume. Spread the word, she's good.

Just back from a long drive to Toronto, an Indian wedding (congrats Ro!) and a long drive back.

A 60-second animated short showing the progress of tagging on Technorati.com between January and July 2005 -- from zero to 20 million tags. Animation created by the Art and Computer Science research group at Carnegie Mellon.
Watch movie Quicktime, 1 min 11.6 MB
(Original post, via Ourmedia MediaRSS Feed)

Funny first person view of the hills of San Fransisco in a car: Watch movie Quicktime, 1.3 min 4.9 MB
(Original post, via MICHAEL VERDI)

Paul and Patty rock!
Watch movie Quicktime, 0.8 min 1.9 MB
(Original post, via DLTQ.org)