My employer, Nokia, announced this week that it is reorganizing Nokia Research Center. The why and how of this operation is explained in the press release.

I learned this on Tuesday along with all my colleagues and have since been finding out how this will affect me. I can of course not comment on any organizational details but it is very likely that I start 2009 in a new job somewhere within Nokia since it looks like the research topic that I have been working on for the past two years is out of scope of the new Helsinki Lab research mission. While I’m of course unhappy about how that decision affects me, I accept and respect it. Short term, I am confident that I will be allowed to finish ongoing research activity since it has been so far highly successful within Nokia and we are quite close to going public with the trial of the system I demoed on Youtube a few weeks ago. I’m very motivated to do this because I’ve put a lot of time in it and want to see it succeed and get a lot of nice press attention.

However, a topic that is of course on my mind is what I will be doing after that and where I will be doing it. In short, I’m currently looking at several very interesting open positions in Nokia. Since I’m doing that anyway, I’ve decided to broaden my search and look at all available options, including those outside Nokia. I will pick the best offer I get. Don’t get me wrong, I think Nokia is a great employer and I am aware my skills are in strong demand inside Nokia. So, if Nokia makes me a good offer, I will likely accept it. But of course, the world is bigger than Finland where I have now spent three years and I am in no way geographically constrained (i.e. willing to move internationally).

So, I’ve updated my CV and am available to discuss any suitable offer.

Since this has happened in the past: please don’t contact me about Symbian programming or J2ME programming type jobs. Not interested in either, I’m a server guy.

Since I’m quite happy with the mac at work. I’m half convinced that I might want one at home. One problem though. The imacs on sale are crap. They’re nice configurations, for 2006. But why the hell would I sink money in a configuration with a maximum of 4GB and a video card that is the 2006 budget model? I don’t want a noisy mac pro. I want a silent iMac. But at the prices they are selling at, I also want specs that are worthy of the current market. My 3 year old AMD more than matches the specs of what Apple is selling as new today.

I looked at the upgrade options. For 150$ I can upgrade from 2 to 4Gb. I know for a fact that these modules sell for around 30€ here in Finland, including 22% taxes. For 250$ I can upgrade the hd to 1TB (from 0.5). 1TB drives are going around 100-120€ here, including taxes. I can upgrade to a 512 Nvidia 8600GS. Gee, do they even sell these at nvidia? These are not upgrade options but an excessive price for what should be the standard, minimum configuration of a 2000€ PC.

The point here is that for this kind of money, I want more upgrade options. I’m not buying a PC that can’t handle memory modules on sale today. 4GB and 8GB modules are commonplace, 16 & 32 GB modules are on the market as well. A decent PC should have 2-4 slots so a maximum of at least 16GB is what I expect today. Given the memory prices, I’d max the memory out too.

1TB drives should be standard in a premium PC at the current prices.

Regarding the video card. Both ATI and NVIDIA are two generations ahead with their chip architecture. A recent card from the 9×00 series should be standard and the upgrade option should be one in the current GTX range. I’d say 512GB is sort of the minimum for acceptable 3D experience right now. Apple ships macbooks with this now.

So, my plan is to wait until Apple upgrades their product line (any month now?). At that moment I will decide that either it is overpriced crap or I will sink good money in a maxed out version of the imac. Basically, the current specs are not worth my money. If I sink 2000+ euro in a PC it needs to significantly out perform my three year old AMD.

Google and Yahoo have both posted a usability study for federated and openid logins. Basically both of them hint at keeping things simple and as easy to use for the user. Google has a quite nice suggestion about the UI but they all but stop at going all the way.

We’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic regarding the demo and youtube movie I linked last week. We have a similar problem that our users have to login, somehow and then login again for OAuth like authentication with e.g. Facebook for extra features.

I really like Google’s UI but would like to suggest a few simplifications:

Basically the site should ask:

With what openid identity, email address or username do you wish to login (excuse ascii art)?

-------------------------------- ------
| http://www.jillesvangurp.com | | OK |
-------------------------------- ------

The user will enter whatever seems right and the server will make a best effort to authenticate with whatever the user provides. Then the server checks the following rules (using AJAX of course) against the address/username

• address/username known, not an IDP -> ask for the password
• address//username known & an IDP -> redirect to IDP. Let user choose username optionally when returning to the site so the user can login with either short login name or IDP identifier.
• not known & an IDP -> redirect to IDP, on return create an account on the fly with info IDP provides
• not known, not an IDP -> show create account form, let user pick a username if email address was entered. Optionally, point out how to sign up with an OpenID provider and of course allow login with a different ID.

This is as simple as it gets. Basically, the only problem is the user entering a username that is in use by somebody else. A password field will show and login will fail.

The failure should look like this.
Login failed because the user and password are incorrect. You can either:

• try another password
• try another openidurl, email address or username
• sign up with us or one of these Identity providers: XXX, YYY, ZZZ

This is as simple as it gets and it still supports a wide variety of login mechanisms.

Advantages:

• Only one question that the user should be able to answer: who am I?
• Using OpenID is rewarded by easy login
• Worst case, user still has to provide a password.
• Can support any kind of authentication, including non password based ones.

Having had my new mac for a few weeks now, it is time for a review.

In a nutshell, consider me switched. Overall it’s great and a huge improvement over my slow XP based laptop.

However, since everybody seems to focus on how great macs are,  I’m going to first focus on everything that I think sucks or otherwise annoys the hell out of me. Aside of course from Steve Jobs launching new models right after I got my mac.

• Key bindings. A matter of taste, habit, and also a matter of consistency. My main gripe is with the latter. I use Mac Office (entourage, word, powerpoint), eclipse, a terminal window and of course firefox. Mac Office is the only of these which preserves the quite sensible behaviour for the home and end key that you find on just about any platform: home means beginning of line, end means end of line. The default in mac applications is different: beginning of document and end of document. I need the former functionality dozens of times per day and the latter … well never actually. So it’s a mess. I ended up reconfiguring eclipse because looking at the java imports each time I press home gets old real quick. Thankfully eclipse is fully configurable. I also attempted configuring the mac itself. Very few applications seem to pay attention. The Terminal application also has its settings, and ignores mac defaults regarding this anyway. Which leaves firefox. Annoyingly still looking for a solution to that one.
• Delete. The backspace is called a delete button. My usb keyboard has two delete buttons and a clear button. One of the delete buttons is actually a real delete button. Command+delete only works with the backspace variant. The clear button seems equivalent to the (real) delete button. My laptop has one delete button but it is not a delete button. I normally use the delete button almost as much as the 26 letter keys. Gimme back my delete button! If this doesn’t sound very logical, consistent or usable that’s because it isn’t.
• Mighty Mouse. Of course I got a Mighty mouse with my mac usb keyboard. Nice experiment this touch sensitive surface but I really mean left click when my index finger clicks left of the wheel/ball thingy. Likewise for right clicks. This goes wrong a lot. Middle clicks are annoyingly difficult. The side buttons require quite a bit of grip to press. Yet, it is surprisingly easy to click them accidentally. In short, strongly considering to hook up a reall mouse now.
• Alt+tab. Expose is nice but often I just want to switch back and forth between two windows. This works fine as long as they are application windows, but not if they are document windows. So open two mails in separate windows and you can’t switch with alt+tab between them.
• Window management. You can minimize windows. But then it is a lot more difficult to switch to them. Double clicking a window title minimizes (on win32 this means maximize). So I accidentally minimize loads of windows which I then need to find back in the dock. Annoying. When minimized, windows are nowhere to be seen in alt+tab or expose. This sucks if you want to switch back to them. Which is the whole point of minimizing vs. closing a window.
• No file move supported in finder. This stinks. No select file, command+x, command+v. No right click, move. No file->move. Apparently possible to do with drag and drop and option key. Defaults to copy though :-/.
• Finder. In general, the finder is a bit underpowered if you are used to windows explorer. I miss my folder tree.
• Time machine + file vault. Loads of trouble to get this working properly. It’s sort of backing up now, finally. But not exactly ‘it just works’.
• No VGA connector. This means I need to drag along a converter whenever I go to meetings because most beamers come without a DVI cable. Annoying.

In all fairness, three weeks is not enough to get rid of my windows habits. Especially since I still have an XP machine at home.

However, I’m getting more efficient on the mac by the day. I’ve absorbed tons of new tricks and have had loads of fun figuring out little issues. Here’s my list of big grin on face causing stuff:

• Display arrangement. I have my laptop left of my 20″ screen. It’s slighly lower. I managed to arrange the screens such that when I move my mouse horizontally, it moves to the other screen at more or less the same altitude. Cool.
• Display settings persist. The display settings survive me unplugging the laptop, using a beamer for some presentation and plugging my monitor back in. Great & just the way it should be.
• Ambient light adjustment. Quite funny when I covered the right most sensor while pressing the delete (or rather backspace), the screen dimmed. Turned out that with the desklight shining on one side of the laptop, covering the lit sensor with your hand causes the screen to compensate for the sudden darkness by dimming. Had a good laugh about that. It actually has two sensors so this is only an issue if you are sitting in the dark next to a desk light.
• Photo screensaver. Looks great with my vacation photos. Apparently my efforts to calibrate my windows PC at home were reasonably successful since the photos look excellent on the laptop, which of course is properly calibrated (being a mac and all that). Of course it dislays different photos on both screens, at the same time. Same for my desktop background, which updates every few seconds (without apparent performance hit).
• Expose. Love it, partially compensates for the alt+tab. Inexplicably, they only show one desktop if you use spaces. I have it hooked up to my side mouse button.
• It’s fast. It should be for this price of course. But still. It is fast. Gone is the endless disk churning that comes with windows.
• It’s silent. This is the most silent laptop I’ve ever worked with. No vacuum cleaner type fans activating and deactivating all the time.
• Multi touch touchpad. This is a really nice feature. Tap with two fingers -> context menu, drag with two fingers -> scroll. So much fun.

Presenting Local Interaction Demo, originally uploaded by jillesvangurp.

Me presenting our Local Interaction demo at the Way We Live Next press event that Nokia organized two weeks ago. Also see the previous post with the youtube video.

I gave a demo of our system at a press event for Nokia a few weeks ago. Our PR people were busy filming and have put several short demo movies on Youtube. Including my demo and several other cool demos from colleagues in Nokia Research.

So enjoy.

Since I expect there will be people interested in learning more about this. I’ll try to give some explanation right here.

In the Youtube movie above, I am showing off our Local Interaction demo, which is a mobile website that shows off our indoor location based service platform. For the positioning we have collaborated with a different team that has been working on a indoor positioning system, which was demoed separately at the same event. Our demo leverages their technology and provides services on top.

Indoor location based services are similar to outdoor location based services in the sense that things like search, navigation, social networking, and media sharing are all things that can benefit from knowing where you are. In a nutshell, we have indoor location enhanced variants of these features integrated into our platform. However indoor location based services are different in the sense that they are much more relevant to people. People spend most of their lives indoors!

Having a platform is nice of course, but working code with real users is nicer. So we have spent most of this year preparing a trial in a real shopping mall here in Helsinki. The website you see has a nice polished UI, rich indoor content for the shopping mall and a set of useful services around the mall concept aimed at both consumers as well as proprietors of the mall, such as shop owners. The advantage of working with a real place is that it forces you to be very pragmatic about a lot of issues.

Doing a demo like ours is easy if you can assume everybody goes to the same building, uses the same phone, and just the right firmware version + your handcrafted application. A substantial part of the Ubiquitous & Pervasive Computing research community is perfectly happy with that sort of demo setups and proofs of concepts. This is why despite decades worth of demos, there’s no significant technology available for consumers beyond the boring old home automation kits and that sort of thing. It takes a bit more to make a real life impact.

A key motivation for our demo is that we don’t want to make such assumptions. Our requirements are: a capable mobile web browser (most modern Nokia phones and many phones from other vendors), and optionally, the indoor positioning client software installed. Like Location based services, our services are actually perfectly usable without positioning so we don’t actually require positioning. Being web based means that we can reach much more users than with a native application.

With everything we do we have the vision that eventually we don’t want to do this in just one shopping mall but world wide in a lot of public places. The primary goal of our trial is to gain experience rolling out this kind of technology and learning more about all the practical and technical obstacles there are for making this work on a more interesting scale in the future. We want to show that our platform is scalable in both a technical sense as well as a business sense. We want to kickoff a whole new market for indoor location based services. It doesn’t exist today, so we have to build the whole ecosystem from scratch.

For the more technical people. Our web platform is based on Python Django and integrates the positioning and other services using REST based services over HTTP. The friends feature we demo is realized using the Facebook API. We rely on Atom pub and Atom feeds internally. We intend to be mashup friendly so as to not have to reinvent every feature ourselves and instead integrate with many existing services. We have an Apache Lucene based search server that powers our indoor location based search feature. We use this feature quite heavily to look for indoor location tagged content such as photos, ads, vouchers, comments, etc. Finally, we use an off the shelf open source map server that serves up the indoor maps. In general, our philosophy is that there are already enough poorly reinvented wheels. We build what we need only if we can’t reuse what is out there. The web is out there and we use it.

For the researchers. A few articles that should be published in the next few months will outline the research we have on this. Meanwhile, you can refer to my publications page for a few workshop papers on a a predecessor of this demo that we did in 2007. Also we did a demo at the Internet of Things conference last April of our 2007 demo. And of course, there will be more details on the trial once we launch it.

About the project. This demo was developed as part of a Nokia project on an “Application Environment for Smart Spaces” which is currently running in Smart Space Lab, which is a part of Nokia Research Center. Headcount has varied quite a bit but currently we are around 8 people working full time on this. My role in this project is pushing architecture solutions and coordinating the development together with a small group of researchers and several excellent software engineers.

Apple - Support - Discussions - Screen auto-dimming when I hit delete ….

LOL, this had me puzzled for a bit. While playing with my mac, I noticed the screen dimmed everytime I hit the delete key.

What happened:

• the mac book pro adjust screen brightness to the ambient light
• it has two light sensors in the stereo speakers
• when pressing the delete, your hand covers one of them
• normally this is not a problem
• … unless you are in a dark room with a desk light to the right of the mac

Hehe.

Otherwise things are fine with my new Mac. Annoying things include having to learn new keybindings and our annoying windows based intranet stuff.

But consider me switched.

I stumbled upon somebody writing about Nokia’s 2007 Way We Live Next event in Oulu. This event was intended to give the outside world a view on what is going on in Nokia Research Center.

Nice quote

Lots of interesting stuff was shown off during the course of the two days and the most interesting I came across was the indoor positioning concept. Using WiFi and specially created maps, the devices we were issued with were running the software which enabled you to move through the NRC building and pinpoint exactly where you were. So, if the next presentation was in room 101, the device would simply, and quickly show you the way. It instantly made me think of the frustration of trying to get where I want in huge shopping centres - and I figured this had to be the perfect solution.

Next week, the 2008 edition of the WWLN is going to be in Espoo and I will be giving a demo there of our indoor location based service platform, customized for a real shopping mall. We’ve demoed last years version of our software platform at the Internet of Things Conference last April. At the time our new platform was already under development for a several months and we are getting ready to start trialing it now. The WWLN event next week will be when we first show this in public and hopefully we’ll get some nice attention from the press on this.

PS. I like (good) beer …

If you’ve read my past reviews of X-plane, you’ll know that I’m somewhat of a fan of that product. It’s an ultra realistic flight simulator. If you’ll read the product page you will see that it boasts a long list of features. I can assure you, they’re being modest. I don’t pay for software very often but I’ve bought v8 and recently v9 of this one.

Anyway, I just had a little WTF moment reading this little blog post from Benjamin Supnik, one of the lead developers of X-plane who works on the scenery engine. They’ve actually ported X-plane to the iPhone! If so far, you didn’t think much of the iPhone as a development platform, look again. This is really impressive.

I just looked up the product page in iTunes and it has some nice screen shots. Of course they don’t ship the full UI or scenery. All you get is an area around Inssbruck (default area in the demo version of the normal version). Probably it is heavily tuned to work nicely on an iphone. However, the mere fact that they have it running at all is very impressive. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to link to product pages in iTunes, so you’ll just have to look it up yourself, producer is Laminar or you can go to Games->Simulation in the iphone section.

Also hilareous is Austin Meyer (founder and owner of Laminar that builds X-Plane) denying there was an iphone version of x-plane, just before he launched it on September 11th. A bit of a symbolic date for launching a flight simulator, don’t you think?

Sadly, I have no iPhone or ipod touch to play with. Working for Nokia and all that.

In April 2007, I replaced a broken power supply in my PC with a Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supply. Check my review here. A few days ago, my pc has started producing a high pitched noise. Really annoying. So, I Google a little and what do I find: Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W Power Supplies apparently have 21% failure rate. Tell tale signs include the damn thing making high pitched noise.

I have to investigate a little further but probably this means the power supply is failing after less than one and a half year. Out of warranty of course. Damn it, really annoying to have to open that case again to replace the same part. Basically, the PC is now nearly three years old and maybe I should just replace it altogether. Something quiet, fast and reliable would be nice.

In a few weeks my new Macbook Pro should arrive at work (ordered yesterday). I was planning to wait and see if I like that and if so, just upgrade to a nice Mac at home as well. Not fully convinced yet.

Feel free to recommend a decent PSU. Has to power a Nvidia 7800, 2 drives, lots of USB hardware and a amd 4400+ dualcore CPU.

Update. I ended up installing a ZALMAN ZM600-HP. Seems to have a few good reviews http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/zm600hp/. It’s expensive, over qualified for the job and supposedly really good and quiet. Sadly the rest of my machine is still rather noisy.

Screenshots And Video Of The New Joost

Joost has announced that they are changing the way their service works. Having used it quite a bit, I think this is probably the best thing for them since it was based on a misguided channel/TV metaphore. However, I wonder (along with Techcrunch) what their added value really is. It used to be that p2p seemed like it was the only way to escape from blocky, tiny videos with low frames per second and audio/video sync problems (aka Real Video, what happened to those guys anyway?).

Just last week I was looking at some videos on Vimeo and noticed that they have streaming HD now. Like Youtube, it starts streaming right away. Unlike Youtube, the video is sharp, full screen, high resolution, and mostly free from severe compression artifacts. In other words, they seem to have figured out a way to push large amounts of data to me cost effectively. I didn’t measure it but I estimate I was getting around 1mbps data from them at least.

Doing this on a large scale used to be really expensive. However, in recent years, content delivery networks (CDNs) have emerged that can cost effectively deliver large downloads to massive amounts of users. A CDN is actually similar to p2p. Essentially it involves ensuring you have a servers+bandwidth in every major provider network and keeping these servers in sync. Bandwidth inside a provider network is a lot easier to get. For providers the benefit is that they don’t need to use expensives bit pipes from other providers to get the content to you. So as long as they don’t run out of local bandwidth (of which they have plenty), they will prefer this. Also with less hops to the user, it is a lot easier to ensure there is actually enough bandwidth to the user. Essentially, this brings the best features of p2p to web streaming and makes Joost more or less redundant. Although arguably, they still have a slight cost advantage here due to their reliance on a CDN (this type of service of course costs money).

There are now several flash based streaming sites that use a CDN. What these services have in common is crappy content. There’s only so much amateur, 3 minute video fragments I can take. Also, 3 minute “commercial” fragments of full content normally broadcasted on really obscure tv channels in the middle of the night is hardly compelling. The reason for this is copyright legislation and a systematic ignoring of users outside the USA by media corporations.

Joost, flawed as it was, actually has some okish content hidden inside it. I quite enjoyed watching episodes of Lexx (an obscure but fun Canadian SF series from the nineties) and also a few full feature kung fu movies from the seventies as well as a few documentaries. I wouldn’t pay for any of that but if you are bored, it’s at least a way to pass some time. But Joost never managed to convince media corporations to provide premium content. They still haven’t solved that problem.

If you live inside the US, life is good, apparently. There’s Apple TV, Amazon, Hulu, and a few others like netflix offering massive amounts of good quality pay per view type HD content for download, and in some cases even streaming. Some of these services are ad supported, some of them are subscription based. Joost won’t stand a chance in that market.

However, for about 5.8 billion people outside the US, life is not so good. Here in Finland there are only a handful of video on demand companies whose offerings suck big time comparatively. Additionally, their UI is in Finnish which makes it extremely hard for me to use them or even to figure out what they are trying to offer me. The US based ones won’t deliver content outside the US because that requires separate deals with media companies for each country. In the US, one deal helps you reach a population of around 250 million users. In europe, countries are a lot smaller. My understanding is that to some extent this type of services is now also available in the UK and Germany, which are relatively large countries.

Finland has only 5 million inhabitants.In other words, no content for me. So, if I want to see a movie, I can hope one of the pay per view TV channels broadcasts it (I don’t have a subscription though); buy the DVD; go to the cinema; or hope one of the handful of local TV stations broadcasts something worth watching.

First impression: Google delivered, I’ve never used a browser this fast. It’s great.

Yesterday, a cartoon was prematurely leaked detailing Google’s vision for what a browser could look like. Now, 24 hours later I’m reviewing what until yesterday was a well kept secret.

So here’s my first impressions.

• Fast and responsive. What can I say? Firefox 3 was an improvement over Firefox 2 but this is in a different league. There’s still lots of issues with having many tabs open in Firefox. I’ve noticed it doesn’t like handling bitmaps and switching tabs gets unusable with a few dozen tabs open. Chrome does not have this issue at all. It’s faster than anything I’ve browsed with so far (pretty much any browser you can think of probably).
• Memory usage. Chrome starts new processes for each domain and not per tab. I opened a lot of tabs in the same domain and the number of processes did not go up. Go to a different domain and you get another chrome process. However, it does seem to use substantial amount of memory in total. Firefox 3 is definitely better. Not an issue with 2 GB like I have and the good news is that you get memory back when you close tabs. But still, 40-60MB per domain is quite a lot.
• Javascript performance. Seems fantastic. Gmail and Google Reader load in no time at all. Easily faster than Firefox 3.
• UI. A bit spartan if you are used to Firefox with custom bells & wistles (I have about a dozen extensions). But it works and is responsive. I like it. Some random impressions here: 
  • no status bar (good)
  • very few buttons (good)
  • no separate search field (could be confusing for users)
  • tabs on top, looks good, unlike IE7.
  • mouse & keyboard. Mostly like in Firefox. Happy to see middle click works. However, / does not work and you need to type ctrl+f to get in page search
• URL bar. So far so good, seems to copy most of the relevant features from Firefox 3. I like Firefox 3’s behaviour better though.
• RSS feeds. There does not seem to be any support for subscribing to, or reading feeds. Strange. If I somehow missed it, there’s a huge usability issue here. If not, I assume it will be added.
• Bookmarks. An important feature for any browser. Google has partially duplicated Firefox 3’s behaviour with a little star icon but no tagging.
• Extensions. none whatsoever :-(. If I end up not switching, this will be the reason. I need my extensions.
• Import Firefox Profile. Seems pretty good, passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, etc. were all imported. Except for my cookies.
• Home screen. Seems nicer than a blank page but nothing I’d miss. Looks a bit empty on my 1600×1200 screen.
• Missing in action. No spelling control, no search plugins (at least no obvious way for me to use them even though all my firefox search plugins are listed in the options screen), no print preview, no bookmarks management, no menu bar (good, don’t miss it)

So, I’m genuinely impressed here. Google is really delivering something exceptionally solid here. Download it and see for yourself.

Posting this from Chrome of course.

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t.

Business week has an interesting article on the economics of platforms. Interesting, but flawed. They compare two platforms (Facebook, and Apple’s mobile platform). The argument goes roughly as follows: Apple is using it’s platform to create a new market by being open and Facebook is using traditional methods of using the market as a control point. Apple is creating an open market and Facebook is making an open market more closed. The author even goes as far as to associate the keywords good and evil here.

The article is flawed because in fact Apple is not creating an open market. They have been removing applications that don’t fit their business model (e.g. anything VOIP related) and are still keeping people from writing about the APIs because NDA has not been lifted yet. Apple is acting as a dictator here. That it is a mostly benevolent one doesn’t matter. It doesn’t sound very open to me in any case. Or very new.

Sure, their platform is pretty nice and their online shop pretty usable. That’s definitely disruptive to the mobile industry, which is not used to good quality platforms and well designed use-cases such as online shops for applications. However, there’s a pretty big market for mobile applications and most people writing for the iphone don’t do so exclusively and instead target multiple mobile platforms. You can download several VOIP applications for S60 or mobile windows and other platforms, as well as numerous games, productivity apps, etc. Then there is J2ME of course with a few billion phones in the market right now. You might say it is crappy but it has a huge reach. Incidentally, Apple also blocks components from their shop that would enable people to run J2ME applications since an open source Java platform has in fact been ported long before Apple even ‘opened’ up their platform. That’s right, a good old case of reverse engineering. Apple’s platform is quite unique in the sense that people were developing for it long before Apple decided to hand out developer kits.

Facebook indeed is also not very open but they were first to a market that they created, which is pretty big by now. As a viral way of spreading new services to users it is pretty much unrivaled so far. It is Google that has created a competition for more openness with their Open Social platform, which is in many ways similar but has open specifications and may be implemented freely by other social networks. Both Google and Facebook have a very similar centralized identity model that is designed to lock users into their mutual platforms (Google Friends Connect & Facebook Connect). Google is maybe being somewhat more smart about it but they are after the same things here: making sure trafic flows through their services so that they can sell ads.

So, Facebook’s model is advertisement driven and Apple’s business is operator driven. Apple makes most of their money from deals with operators who subsidize iphones and give Apple a share of the subscription revenue. That’s brilliant business and Apple protects it by removing any application from their shop that has conflicting interests with this revenue stream.

However, the key point of the article that the platform serves as a market creation tool is interesting. Apple managed to create an impressive amount of revenue (relative to their tiny market share of the overall mobile market) and Facebook has managed to create a huge market for Facebook applications. Both are being challenged by competitors who have no choice to be more open.

Interestingly, Google is competing on both fronts and can be seen as the primary threat to both Apple and Facebook’s platforms. Google could end up opening up the mobile market for real because it is not protecting any financial interests there but instead are trying to spawn a mobile internet market. Android is designed from the ground up to do just that. It needs to be good enough for developers, users and operators and Google has worked hard to balance interests enough so as to not alienate any of these.

All three are fighting for the favours of developers. Developers, developers, developers! (throws chair across the room & jumps like a monkey). That too is not new although Microsoft seems to have forgotten about them lately.

Intriguing phrase (about Alexandria’s lighthous) from an article (page 31) by Neal Stephenson from 1996:

The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely - you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

Songbird Blog » Songbird Beta is Released!.

Having played with several milestone builds of songbird, I was keen to try this one. This is a big milestone for this music player & browser hybrid. Since I’ve blogged on this before, I will keep it short.

The good:

• New feathers (songbird lingo for UI theme) looks great. Only criticism is that it seems to be a bit of an iTunes rip off.
• Album art has landed
• Stability and memory usage is now acceptable for actually using the application
• Unlike iTunes, it actually supports the media buttons on my logitech keyboard.

The bad (or not so good since I have no big gripes):

• Still no support for the iTunes invented but highly useful compilation flag (bug 9090). This means that my well organized library is now filled with all sorts of obscure artists that I barely know but apparently have one or two songs from. iTunes sorts these into compilation corner and I use this feature to keep a nice overview of artists and complete albums.
• Despite being a media player with extension support, there appears to be no features related to sound quality. Not even an equalizer. Not even as an extension. This is a bit puzzling because this used to be a key strength of winamp, the AOL product that the songbird founders used to be involved with.
• Despite being a browser, common browser features are missing. So no bookmarks, no apparent RSS feed, no Google preconfigured in the search bar, etc. Some of these things are easily fixed with extensions.

Verdict: much closer than previous builds but still no cigar. Key issue for me is compilation flag support. Also I’d really like to see some options for affecting audio playback quality. I can see how having a browser in my media player could be useful but this is not a good browser nor a good media player yet.