Archive for the 'Technology' Category

A Tale of Three Blog Entries

Published
by
Jon
on October 7, 2008
in Technology
. 2 Comments

Here is what the Google Analytics for my humble blog - Armchair Theorist - looks like from early July until today:

What really stands out is the three spikes in traffic I received in the past three months. Let’s take a deeper look, shall we…

The Mini Spike (Left Side)

On July 12, I attended the E27 Unconference event, and promptly blogged about it on July 14. This brought in 83 unique visiters for me the next day, a then record-high. This blog post was also my most commented post ever, with 23 comments. Of course, a bunch of those comments were from me responding to people, but who’s counting anyways. ;-)

Anyway, for that post, I linked to all of the other blog entries I could find which talked about the event, and pretty much everyone reciprocated with a back link as well. Thanks to this post, I was able to interact with a few bloggers online for the first time, including the always interesting Claudia.

This post also got me a then-high 18 “pongs” on Singapore blog aggregator Ping.sg.

The “M” Spike (Middle)

On September 2, the Google Chrome comic was leaked, and I promptly blogged about the impending release of the Google Chrome web browser. Again, I linked to all of the existing blog coverage of Chrome I could find, including the official Google blog.

This brought in a new record-high 136 unique visitors the next day, mostly thanks to search engine queries for “Google Chrome” as well as traffic from the Google blog.

After a day or two of downtime, I blogged again about Chrome, but this time on my experiences using Chrome once I had a chance to download it and play around with it for a bit. Again, I linked to the official Google blog, and I was able to top my previous record by registering 138 unique visiters on September 5.

The Ping.sg community was less than thrilled though, with neither blog post registering more than 4 “pongs”.

The Big A%$ Spike (Right Side)

I attended a party during F1 weekend, and promptly blogged about it. In my opinion, this was a pretty crappy post, with not much content in it. But it did have a few photos of scantily-dressed lingerie models who were at the party. I also diligently labeled my post as “NSFW“.

The result was a new record-high 283 unique visitors to my blog on September 29, and over 500 visits over the next five day period.

The Ping.sg community particularly liked the post, giving me a ridiculous 43 “pongs”  and placing me at the pole position of the daily leader board for the first (and likely last) time.

However, only one guy left a comment.

My Key Takeaways

  1. If you want people to read your blog, always blog about something topical- i.e. posts that have to be read right now. You don’t necessarily have to break the news, but ride on the second wave of readers by offering a deeper analysis beyond what is superficially covered by the first wave of “news breakers”.
  2. Link to as much of the first wave coverage as possible, without making your blog entry look like an annoying link blog. Try to link to the central news source (e.g. official Google blog for Google Chrome) if possible, especially if they are high-volume blogs.
  3. Events are usually topical and good to blog about, since people will either a) miss the event and want to read about it, or b) attended the event and want to see if their mugshot appears on any blogger’s photos.
  4. When all else fails and you still can’t get readership, blog about girls, parties, upskirts, celebrities, and sex. And don’t forget to label your post as “NSFW”. 8-)

I’m a PC. How About You?

Published
by
Jon
on September 21, 2008
in Technology
. 2 Comments

So unfortunately, the first wave of Microsoft commercials featuring Seinfeld and Bill Gates are done.

And here comes the second wave of Microsoft commercials, featuring the theme, “I’m a PC.”

Although I enjoyed the Seinfeld commercials greatly, in my opinion this second set of commercials sends a stronger message - that is Apple looks like an elitist and snobbish company by basically stereotyping all PC users as nerdy, desk-bound boring office workers.

Check it out!

YouTube Preview Image YouTube Preview Image YouTube Preview Image

Initial feedback on these new commercials seems to be very positive.

But of course, some Apple diehards will never change. :)

I’m a PC. How about you?

CrunchBase Information on Microsoft
Microsoft
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5 Reasons Why Microsoft’s New Seinfeld Commercials Don’t Suck

Published
by
Jon
on September 13, 2008
in Technology
. 5 Comments
  1. Good, bad or confused, the commercials got everyone talking about Microsoft, didn’t it?
  2. Even if one doesn’t understand the commercial, one has to admit that it is still pretty darn funny, albeit in a classical Seinfeld “funny about nothing” kind of way.
  3. In Apple commercials, you see Justin Long and John Hodgman make fun of each other. In Microsoft commercials, you get both arguably the most successful and funniest comedian in the 90’s as well as the richest man (and geek) in the world making fun of themselves. Talk about star power!
  4. And boy do they make fun of themselves. Seinfeld’s money quote: “I have so many cars, I get stuck in my own traffic.”
  5. Finally, if you do look deep enough, there actually is a message: Nowadays, PCs running Windows are so pervasive and ubiquitous around our daily lives, it’s almost too easy to forget that the folks at Microsoft are the ones who brought these indispensable tools to us.

For those of you who haven’t seen the commercials yet, here is Part 1:

YouTube Preview Image

And here is Part 2:

YouTube Preview Image

Gates (reading a bedtime story to a little boy): “The fact that a design uses inheritance and polymorphism doesn’t make it a good design…”

Little Boy: “Are there any monsters in this story?”

Gates: “Yes, but it’s OK. There is a firewall.”

Ain’t Gonna Give up Firefox for Google Chrome

Published
by
Jon
on September 4, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

During the last 24 hours, it seems that everyone and their neighbor has something to say about Google’s new open source web browser, Google Chrome.

I have blogged about my initial observations on Chrome yesterday, but today I finally had the chance to download Chrome and try it out for one full day.

Here are some of my quick follow-up thoughts, in Christmas carol format:

5 awesome things about Chrome

  1. The speed improvements are as good as advertised. Even when the page is loading slowly due to network effects, somehow it doesn’t seem as slow as in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
  2. The new V8 JavaScript engine is wicked fast. For most sites, this may not matter much, but Chrome really shines when you are using heavily AJAX-ed applications like Google Reader or Gmail.
  3. The “Create application shortcuts…” feature to run any web page as a desktop application with no browser controls is really cool.
  4. The multi-process architecture brings browser stability to a whole different level. I forcibly closed a chrome.exe process using my Task Manager, and only one tab is terminated without affecting anything else. And even then, the tab will suggest to you to reload the tab if you want to try again.
  5. The Omnibox will take some time getting used to, but I do agree that the intention of using the Omnibox to provide an integrated and universal browser “command prompt” is the correct approach.

4 things I can do in Firefox that I can’t do in Chrome

  1. Block advertisements using my Adblock Plus add-on.
  2. Access my delicious bookmarks using my Delicious Bookmarks add-on.
  3. Highlight some text from a web page and right-click to have the option to: a) search for the highlighted text on any of my search engines (not just the default), or b) open a new tab with the highlighted text as the URL (enabled by my Context Search add-on and URL Link add-on, respectively).
  4. Post content directly to Evernote and vi.sualize.us directly using my Evernote add-on and vi.sualize.us add-on, respectively.
(There’s actually a whole lot more, but you get the idea. ;-) )

3 things Chrome absolutely must implement to have a chance at being a IE/Firefox-killer

  1. A way to support extensions or add-ons like Mozilla and Firefox. Look, Firefox is not a perfect browser. But because of Firefox’s add-on framework and the hundreds of add-ons available in the community, users can tweak and extend Firefox close to perfection. Chrome absolutely has to support extensions if it is to be taken seriously as a “prosumer” web browser. If extensions are not possible because they compromise Chrome’s security model, at the very least Chrome must provide a Greasemonkey-style capability for users to do scripting. Anything for people other than Chrome developers to customize and modify the browser’s capabilities. Yes, I realize that Chrome is open source, and theoretically anyone can take the source and make improvements to it. However, I would bet that a whole lot more folks would be capable to do scripting or plug-in development than to hack on the actual Chrome source code.
  2. Built-in mashup capability. Internet Explorer 8 has Web Slices. Firefox has Ubiquity. Chrome has … ?
  3. Integration with other web browsers. How about the ability to right-click on a link and have the option to launch that URL in Internet Explorer? How about being able to drag and drop a Chrome tab onto Firefox and have it launch in a Firefox window, or even better, dock directly into Firefox? The former should be trivial to implement. The latter may sound like fantasy, but if you remember Google’s close relationship with the Mozilla Foundation and the fact that there are Mozilla developers on Google’s payroll, then it may not sound so far fetched after all.
  4. (Bonus) Export bookmarks. This feature is so blatantly obvious and simple to implement that I’m shocked that it’s not available in Chrome. I find Google Chrome’s Help Center entry on this matter very telling. Either they a) do not expect you to ever use any other web browser once you switch to Chrome, or b) they fully expect you to continue using your other web browser while you are giving Chrome a test spin.
This feature is not available at the moment. If you imported your bookmarks from another browser, your data should still be available in the original browser.

2 ways I’ll be using Chrome in the meantime

  1. Desktop launcher for my most commonly-used web applications. That includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, and my Wordpress control panel. Any application that is JavaScript-intensive and pretty self-contained will be a good candidate for this. As Steve Hodson puts it, there are just people that prefer certain applications living on the desktop as separate entities.
  2. As a toy and a testing ground. Unfortunately, that’s it for now. It is not ready to replace Firefox as my default web browser… yet.

One final opinion

Google Chrome is not going to destroy Microsoft or desktop software. Let’s just get that out of the way first.

If you have been reading commentary in the past 24 hours on what Chrome means in the epic struggle between Microsoft and Google, you would think that Google Chrome is the key strategic piece to displace Windows and put everything in the cloud.

Not so fast. I would bet that after five years, folks will still happily run desktop applications just like they have happily been doing for the past decade or so even as we see the Internet become mainstream. Google may have grabbed 1% market share in a single day, but it will not crush Firefox much less Internet Explorer.

Yes, Chrome is a strategic piece for Google, but perhaps for different, less ambitious reasons, as many others have suggested.

Here are three possibilities:

  1. As a web company, Google needs to put its stake in the ground in the way web standards and technologies get adopted and implemented, and the easiest way to do that is by being a web browser vendor. If your web browser gets enough mind share and/or market share, you get a certain influence in how web standards get developed and adopted by websites.
  2. As David Mullings commented in Facebook on my earlier blog post, Google may be using Chrome as one of their entry points in collecting data to benefit DoubleClick, AdSense, and their other services which can benefit from behavioral targeting. And as TechWag noticed, there are just some things that don’t seem right with Chrome’s EULA. Well, looks like Google has updated their EULA.
  3. Google really just wanted to flex its technical muscle to the industry and placate their developers who have been dying to prove to the world that anything Google does, it does it better than the rest of the world. For publicity, for morale, or for ego - take your pick.
CrunchBase Information on Firefox
Firefox
Information provided by CrunchBase
CrunchBase Information on Google Chrome
Google Chrome
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5 Observations on Google Chrome

Published
by
Jon
on September 2, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

So the cat is out of the bag early. Google will be launching it’s own open source web browser called Google Chrome (as of Sep 2 in Singapore, this link doesn’t work yet). It has since been confirmed on Google’s official blog.

Give credit where credit is due: The news originally broke from Germany-based Philip Lenssen, who received a 39-page comic book in the mail talking about this new web browser. His website has been up and down all day due to overwhelming traffic.

Why was Philip the only guy who received the comic book? Well apparently, Google sent out all these copies of the comic book to various tech bloggers and expected all of them to arrive after Labor day in the US (Sep 1), since the US postal service doesn’t operate on public holidays. However, the post office does open in Germany, and thus Philip was serendipitously given an early scoop.

As powerful as Google is, they do not control worldwide postal service… yet.

And using a comic book to market a new technology product? Brilliant. Whatever you say, Google sure knows what buttons to push to excite and motivate geeks.

Believe it or not, in the span of a little more than 10 hours, the Google Chrome web browser has already been covered ad nauseam over the Internet.

I won’t talk about what Google Chrome means or how it works or what it will include. You can read all about it from many other wonderful folks like Dare Obasanjo, John Furrier, Mathew Ingram, ReadWriteWeb and BoomTown. And don’t forget to read the comic.

However, here are my observations on Google Chrome which I haven’t really seen addressed anywhere yet:

User Interface

I’ve found some initial screen shots of the Google Chrome web browser from ElectricPig, which seem legitimate to me. However, is it just me, or does the UI look quite a bit too simple and underwhelming?

The main emphasis of Google Chrome (at least for this release) seems to me to be back-end architecture and security, and not so much on the UI. If you look at the comic book, more pages were devoted to talking about the multi-process architecture, Google Gears, the new V8 JavaScript engine and the sandbox security model than about new UI improvements.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, since Google absolutely has to get most of the back-end stuff right the first time. But it just means that for now, from a user’s point of view, Google Chrome is perhaps only a marginal improvement in user experience (if any at all), compared to what I can currently do with Firefox/Internet Explorer + plugins.

Things like pr0n mode, the OmniBox, and even screen thumbnails to some extent are things that can already be done in Firefox with the right extensions.

Let’s just hope that the speed and stability improvements in Chrome can be the game changer as far as user experience is concerned (not that Firefox 3 has really crashed on me very often).

Update: More screen shots available from Google Blogoscoped.

Buy vs. Build

Jeremiah Owyang openly wonders on Twitter why Google, wanting to do an open source web browser, decided to build their own from scratch instead of building/buying/enhancing what Mozilla/Firefox already provided.

To me the answer is pretty simple:

  1. Hardcore developers love to build things from scratch, and Google is basically a company run by hardcore developers.
  2. Technically, it was not practical or feasible to retrofit Mozilla/Firefox into a multi-process architecture. Since the multi-process architecture seemed to be priority numero uno and mandatory for all the rest of the security and sandboxing to work, the only choice is to start from scratch

Plug-ins Anyone?

I may be wrong, but I didn’t get the impression from reading the comic that Google Chrome supports any kind of plug-in architecture whatsoever. The plug-ins I’m referring to are not runtimes like Flash and Silverlight (which I believe Chrome should support), but the numerous small extensions which one can use to incrementally improve and extend the functionality of the web browser, like what you can do in all Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox.

I sure hope that is not an oversight, because the last thing I want to see is dozens of different forks of the Chrome source code just because everyone wants to extend their web browser functionality in one way or another.

Although Mozilla and Firefox are open source projects, I believe the reason why their codebase has more or less avoided major fragmentation was at least partially due to the rich plug-in architecture provided to developers who wish to extend the browser functionality. It’s always more reassuring for the developer to be able to develop a plug-in to add a new menu item instead of mucking around with the core browser source code.

Let’s hope this is not an oversight and Google does eventually implement a strong plug-in architecture for Chrome, if not in the initial release.

The Hooking War

A lot has been said about how Google Chrome is basically a defensive move against Microsoft’s upcoming IE8 by protecting Google Search’s various “hooks” on the desktop (default search engine, Google Toolbar, etc.).

The thinking goes - IE8 will make it more difficult for Google to hook onto the desktop, since IE8 will not work with Google Toolbar and the search engine will default to Live.com, and thus Google will lose market share and lose all this money from search advertising and blah blah blah.

So Google must counter with it’s own browser so it can dictate its terms on how the browser war is going to be fought and won and so it can maintain an indefinite presence on the desktop to funnel users to their search advertising and blah blah, take over the world, blah.

Har? Am I the only one who doesn’t get this? Is the Armchair Theorist dumb? (apparently yes…)

Dear Google: your company brand is a freaking verb, for crying out loud. 99% of people who use the Internet equate Google to Internet search. Google may be lacking in certain things, but mind share is definitely not one of them.

Anyone who wants to use Google as their primary search engine already does and will continue to do so, regardless whether they are using IE8, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

My opinion is that if anything, Google Chrome is a good move to force web browser vendors to continue to innovate and evolve, but a pawn in the hooking war it is not.

Google Stock Price

I’ve previously blogged about how Google always has a knack of reinvigorating its company outlook with industry-shaking news every time its stock price gets too low.

Anyone want to wager that after the Google Chrome announcement, Google stock will make a pretty nice recovery from it’s current four month low of $463 a share? ;)

CrunchBase Information on Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Information provided by CrunchBase