Songbird 0.7: Huge Improvements
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Music, Social, Web
Songbird, the desktop music player powered at its core by Mozilla technology, has recently released a new version: Songbird 0.7 (RC). This release offers several new features for the player, including Last.fm support and a refreshed UI. For music lovers, this new version is definitely worth a look.
Tags: firefox, mozilla, Songbird, Songbird 0.7
Reddit Goes Open Source
Posted by James | Filed under Social, Web
Reddit has decided to open source their entire code base, allowing developers to see exactly how the social news site works. With the move, Reddit is encouraging developers to submit their own code and extensions for improving the site. Of course, they are also potentially opening up the site to serious gaming, since developers will be able to dissect precisely how Reddit’s algorithms determine what is popular and makes it to the homepage.
Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, thinks this transparency is something users deserve, and is a strong competitive move against leading social news site Digg. “Digg has struggled to stay transparent with their users,” he said. “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page.” Of course, he is referring to the fact that Digg’s algorithms are completely secretive, often creating frustration amongst users when stories with a lot of Diggs and comments are left off the homepage, but seemingly less important stories find their way to the front.
Much like Facebook’s fbOpen, the idea of going open source isn’t so much as to encourage developers to build their own Reddit clones. In fact, Reddit is using the same licensing structure as Facebook – CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) – which stipulates that anyone who uses the Reddit code needs to make their changes available to everyone, as well as acknowledge they are using it.
Reddit’s new site for developers – http://code.reddit.com – is now available. At this point, the race is on to see who can figure out the algorithm first, and it’ll be interesting to watch and see how heavily people try to game the site once it becomes public knowledge. It should be noted that when the company launched its new re-design a couple of weeks ago, within minutes the most popular story on the site was one about how badly it sucked, encouraging Reddit to bring back the old version!
Tags: algorithms, Common Public Attribution License, CPAL, digg, facebook, Facebook Open Platform, Open Source, reddit, social news
Instant Messaging 2.0
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Future, Mobile, Privacy, Social, Web
There are some interesting things going on in the world of Instant Messaging these days. There is potentially going to be a shift from proprietary networks to ones built on an open standard called Jabber (aka XMPP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The technical details of Jabber which I’ll example below, make this a very big deal.
The biggest IM providers are MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and Google. For years, the first three operated proprietary, closed protocols. If you are logged in to AOL, you can’t talk to people logged in to MSN (there have been some efforts to link these networks; but in a such a way that the closed protocols are still used). You can’t reuse your contacts across accounts, just as MySpace contacts can’t be reused by Facebook (until DataPortability.org gets going maybe…).
Then Google entered the game. Instead of creating their own IM protocol, they implemented an existing well known IM protocol originally called Jabber, now called XMPP. XMPP had been around for a while and had been implemented most notably by several enterprise collaboration suite providers. But Google implementing it caused the big three to wake up and take notice.
Tags: instant messaging, jabber, open standard, protocols, xmpp
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
