Social Bookmarking with Delicious

I am pretty familiar with most of the new "Web 2.0" tech, Delicious being one of them. I had used it years ago while working at a startup in SV. We had successfully used their API for an aspect of our product. However they changed their entire API, tagging process, tag curation abilities - really everything that Delicious what it was. We had stopped using their API three years ago or so when they began to go downhill. They relaunched and were never the same.

Anyhow for the purposes of this assignment, I went ahead and created my own account.

I tagged several items of "Web 2.0" content. This was an easy process, I found it fairly intuitive and straightforward.

This is an "OK" resource for researching the latest trends, as it relates to various topics. It allows you to gain the aggregate opinion as to the best of certain categories of knowledge. (Aggregate opinion does not make something valid however!) This also allows you to get your own links out there and promote them in a way that could allow them to go viral if they have that certain 'je ne sais quoi'.

My biggest problem with the site comes with searching for content based on tags. I ran into the same problem that I had with Flickr. That is the problem of inconsistent or mislabeled content. Since there is no standard to which content must be tagged, and there are varying definitions of what content tags should mean, this leads to content that is difficult to be searched. Additionally political trends come out in the tagging, leading to partisan struggles over the nature of certain tags.

 Even apart from the issues of deliberate mistagging or spamming of content by other users. There is another problem of users mistyping their tags, or not following the same tag structure as others. i.e "Rim Fire" vs "RimFire". Delicious, back when it was Del.icio.us had an Autocomplete feature to the Tags that it no longer has. It does have autocomplete from your previous entries, but previously it had a feature that allowed autocomplete from popular tags that matched what you were starting to type. This is a critical mistake on their part! They do have an "insert recommended tags" check box, but I find this not as useful as the previous setup. I listed MY biggest problem with Delicious, but I believe there is a larger problem facing them.

I derived this from Google Trends

I believe that the world has moved on and left Delicious behind. Their search traffic is at 60% of what it was at peak and is declining. Their competitive ranking is 5th and dropping.

Derived from Compete.com, a site analytics tool. Competive Rank in Unique Visitors (UVS)

They are not innovating, and have not listened to users regarding the changes. I believe there are far better options these days for researching trends, and getting your information out there. (Twitter, Facebook, etc) And there are better social bookmarking options. I think we see an extension of that in the Pinterest phenomenon. The web changes and companies need to move in order to keep up...or die.

Flickr...my experience.

I have used Flickr in the past, I signed up under a different account back in 2008. However I later cancelled my Yahoo account. This also cancelled my access to my Flickr account, however it left my Intellectual Property up, in the form of my photos. (I am also a Photographer).  My username from yahoo was recycled and now someone else has control over my IP. I emailed Yahoo and Flickr customer support and never received any sort of response from them. So that is the background that I have with Flickr...not great.

For the purposes of this assignment I created a new Flickr account. They have changed a lot of the controls in the intervening years (the only thing constant is change) and I felt that most of the controls were not as intuitive as they were previously. Flickr now uses what we call "Mystery Meat" Navigation. (It is bad design and impedes usability.)

Despite the poor layout, I managed to upload three images that I created myself. I took a couple comics from the well known comic Dilbert and created my own. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, even encourages this type of Web 2.0 behavior, know as a Mashup.
The upload process itself was smooth, and I tagged the images with appropriate tags. Upon clicking the tags and seeing what other images were also tagged with the same tags, it seemed there was an unending list of images.

The problem with user defined tags is that they are not always very cohesive in terms of vocabulary. With the example of "Mashup" that I used; upon searching for the tag "mashup" I began to see a lot of photos of people skating. I investigated this further and there is a phenomenon where competitive roller derby skaters get together and call it a "mashup", definitely not what most of us would consider a "mashup".  This illustrates one of the problems of users defining tags, it can lead to ambiguity in definitions, which distorts the process of tagging.

For the third image, I created a Mosaic using Andreamosaic. It is a small piece of freeware that allows a user to take numerous other images and create a mosaic from them. I created the "WEB2.0" image in Photoshop and then fed approximately 110 other images into Andreamosaic that I had culled from around the web. The 110 images that I used were from various logos, concepts, trends, memes or comics that I felt best embodied the Web2.0 concept. The Andreamosaic program then spit out a mosaic from those 110 images that replicated the original "Web2.0" image that I created in Photoshop. I tagged this with the phrase "Web 2.0".

This tag represented the other problem that I ran into with Flickr and the user tagging system. SPAM! Lots of it. For common phrases, there were numerous photos posted that were nothing more than advertising that took advantage of the fact that "Web 2.0" was a popular tag. I researched this some more by going to other classmate's photostreams. One example used "Blog" as a tag. This too resulted in a flood of spam advertising playing the popularity of the word. This was repeated with several other tags as well.

I also had some other photos on my photostream, that for the purpose of the class I decided to make private so as not to flood my photostream with too much material. The process for this was very non-intuitive and involved actually needing to read a tutorial on how to change permissions on a mass of photos. The fact that I had to resort to reading a tutorial speaks volumes to the lack of ease that things are accomplished on Flickr. I am very web savvy, I can't tell you the last time I required a tutorial for anything. Not a great impression with regards to the new layout for Flickr.

They have tried really hard to embrace the whole AJAX design paradigm, I am not sure that it entirely "works" for their front page, but I can appreciate what they are striving for.


BTW, the link to my Flickr is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/58192505@N05/

Browser Review - Dooble

For the browser requirement, I downloaded and reviewed Dooble.

Dooble is an open source browser, source code is available via Source Forge. It is based on WebKit, much like many other modern browsers.

http://gohelrakesh.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/webkit-web-browser-engine/
Some of the products WebKit is found in.

Dooble is released under the GPL license and as such is able to be freely distributed. The version available for Windows that I tested was Version 1.44.

My initial impression was it is a very slick browser, very minimal. Almost Zen. Additionally it appears to be very fast, rendering pages must faster than Firefox. I couldn't say if it is faster than Chrome, but it might be...which is actually saying quite a bit.  

Here is a screenshot from the install on my system. (Windows 7)

Despite the initial impression, I am not sure that I could find myself using this as my browser. There are certain features that I need as a developer, one of them is a robust code inspector. Dooble doesn't have one built-in. And I didn't find one among their plugins that I cared for. Additionally, the amount of plugins available were rather lacking. Obviously with being a niche browser, there are only niche developers who are making extensions or plugins for the browser. 

I currently primarily use Firefox, which is not the fastest browser but it has LOTS of plugins to do just about anything you can think of in a browser. I use Chrome occasionally as well, but am concerned with the use of my personal information by google. I understand the irony too with using Blogger to publish that.
Regardless I will be uninstalling this browser. My only niche browser that I use with any regularity is Opera, primarily for the mobile caching they provide in Android.

Minty Goodness

I went ahead and downloaded the latest version of Linux Mint (15). I installed this open source operating system on a virtual machine (Ahfey, 2012), in this case using a program called Virtual Box. VB is also open source, and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to experiment with a new operating system without putting their primary installation and data at risk. It allows for virtualization experimenting for free. I cover it in greater depth in another blog post.


I installed Linux Mint 15 on the Virtual Box which allowed me to test drive the new OS within Windows. I am thoroughly impressed with it.



The install process was very easy, arguably easier than Windows 7, I have yet to experience Windows 8. It recognized all of my hardware and installed the appropriate drivers with no intervention on my part, even playing nicely with my graphics card – typically an area that Linux has struggled with. 

Install process

The user interface is great looking, and is very easy to adapt to if you are coming from a Windows background. It has the menu in the familiar place of the "Start Menu" for windows. It has similar right click context menus. Things just generally make sense if you are coming from a windows background.

My desktop

For those coming from a Mac OSX background I would recommend Ubuntu Linux with the Unity interface.

Believe it or not, this is actually Ubuntu Linux with an OSX theme applied to it.

 Linux Mint came with many productivity software choices pre-installed and ready to work “out of the box”, everything from office software in the form of LibreOffice to photo editing in the form of Gimp. It also came with Firefox, Thunder Mail, and Pidgin IM client. Trying out Linux Mint will expose you to a wealth of open source software for the best price on the planet, free!

Compared to Windows 7, Linux Mint is a breath of fresh air. (When I wrote this, I didn't see the bad pun there....it was not intended. lol.)  It just works! Windows is sort of the default choice for most users, but if you are willing to step outside your comfort zone a little there are a plethora of choices that are infinitely more customizable than Windows 8 or OSX. I am not really happy with a lot of the design choices seen in Windows 8. The "Metro" interface that they have forced on users as an "improvement" is what made me start looking seriously at switching Operating Systems. I don't want to end up like hapless XP users who haven't upgraded yet. (They are high and dry. Microsoft support, including virus defense ended for XP this summer.)  Overall I enjoy the fact that I don't have to worry about viruses like Windows users do. There are two factors to that; Windows has the lionshare of the market for OSes hence they get targeted more often by malware. The other and arguably more important factor is that Linux being built in the image of Unix is very compartmentalized and requires Admin approval to change just about anything. This prevents malware and virus from wrecking havoc on your data!
Plus any legacy windows applications can be run in an emulator program called WINE, which runs most windows applications reasonably well.

And the real reason is that there is a lot of nerd cred that comes with using Linux. ;-)

References

Ahfey, T. (2012, Nov 20). Install Linux Mint 14 Nadia Using Virtualbox On Windows 7 . Retrieved from Youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIqR--Lj0_Y

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a really great piece of open source software that allows a user to install and use an operating system on top of another operating system in its own little sandbox. This basically allows the creating of multiple virtual computers on your one physical machine.

This facilitates a few different things.

1. Installing software on an experimental basis without messing up your primary install. 
2. Allows the "test driving" of a new Operating System without committing any of your data to it.
3. Snapshots and subsequent reloads from that snapshot that make backups a breeze!
4. Allows testing of software on different platforms easily, perfect for a developer with limited space.

Those are just the things that I have found use for it with, I am sure others would have other ideas. 

Running VirtualBox on my Windows 7 host with various Linux guests. No instances started yet.

For the purposes of the assignment, I downloaded the most recent version of VirtualBox (4.2.16 as of this writing). I installed it and then promptly downloaded Linux Mint and installed it virtually. I briefly cover my experiences with Linux Mint in another post found here on my blog. 

Linux Mint 15 running inside a virtual instance via VirtualBox. The window is capable of being resized or even displayed in full screen mode.

The best feature, in my opinion, of VirtualBox is that I don't notice it. It just works quietly in the background allowing me to use other operating systems with no risk. The guest Operating System runs quickly with no hesitation. VirtualBox uses system resources effectively and when I switch back to the  host system, putting the guest in the background, it experiences no slow down or lag.  I probably have slightly better system specs than most, but barely.  (Intel I5 2500K OC'ed to 3.6ghz, 8gb ram, 256gb SSD NVIDIA GTX430) As I said, nothing super impressive, but decent enough. I allocate 2 gb of ram to the guest system and 2 cores of the quad core processor, which seems to be plenty for this setup. I haven't used it for anything intensive yet, but I will be downloading Blender (open source 3d creation tool) and putting it through its paces with that.

I have used commercial virtualization software and it ran much the same, except VirtualBox actually ran faster than the commercial software, VMWare. VMWare does much the same thing, but for much more money. Much of the features are the same, snapshots, multiple VMs, system recovery, etc. They also offer additional features, but none that I care to use. There is absolutely no question for me, VirtualBox is the much better value. I haven't run across a scenario where the "personal cloud" features they tout are worth it. (Besides that being such a bastardization of what a "Cloud" is.) 

(net)Beans, (net)Beans...the magical fruit...

Ok, not those sort of beans....

This kind of beans...(Netbeans 7.3.1)

 For my PHP development work, I went ahead and downloaded the latest version of Netbeans (7.3.1 as of the time of this writing). This is the best open source Integrated Development Environments (IDE) I have had the pleasure of using. I have worked with other open source IDEs, such as Eclipse. I am also familiar with proprietary IDEs, such as that provided by Jetbrains in the form of PHPstorm. I worked in a development position that required use of PHPstorm, so I have experience with the IDE in a professional development setting. Even so, I have switched all of my development work to Netbeans. The first thing that stands out is the user interface is every bit the equal of PHPstorm, or any other IDE that I have used, proprietary or otherwise.

This is a screenshot of PHPstorm for comparison

 As far as important features, there are no noticeable differences – debugging capabilities, syntax highlighting, auto-complete, and overall workflow is relatively the same.  The differences come mostly in forms of preferences, and a small speed increase in favor of PHPstorm, although a stability hit comes with that extra speed. 

Additionally PHPstorm has had better Git integration. Git is a cloud based repository system for your code, very useful when coding with a team. It allows you to easily roll back changes to the code base if there is an issue.

For my purposes Netbeans is the winner. Ultimately though, it will be a matter of personal preference, especially when it comes to something as contentious as an IDE, to many it is almost a matter of religion, some even replete with their own hymns. ;-)

Wooof....err...WHUPF! (Or the future of the Social Web)

 

.

Postbubble.com errr...wait. Who?

Here we have had another prognosticator of what is was and what is was not going to make it in this brave new world of Web 2.0

They have since gone belly up.

 And no...not in the cute way that a kitty does when it wants you to scratch its belly, but in the dead fish kind of way.

 Like others, their motivations may have been suspect from the beginning. Initially it seemed kosher, they said they just wanted to " see the survival of the fittest" in regards to Web 2.0
By the end of their run in 2008, a mere 2 years later btw, they took to referring to themselves as kingmakers of sorts. "Postbubble has been sinking or floating companies based upon a variety of factors..." This sort of high-handed egotistical drivel only serves to cast doubts on their journalistic integrity. When it became apparent that they were forging their own startup that furthered the suspicions. What better idea than to sink or float other startups based on what you were doing?

TechCrunch...Sigh...Where to begin?

I very much used to be a fan of TechCrunch, initially it seemed that they had some of the best reporting on the various going ons in the valley (Silicon Valley).
Michael Arrington started the blog back in 2005. I remember this because I was at the University of California, Davis at the time. (Just a short sprint from Silicon Valley, or at least comparatively to the rest of the nation.) My attention has always been on startups and startup culture. This is still where my focus is, despite being temporarily located several thousand miles away from the valley.



Anyhow his blog grew immensely popular in a short period of time covering general tech and startups as well. However it became apparent that there were issues early on.



There were general concerns about reporting standards as well. This does bring the question though, does a blog need to meet the same standards as traditional journalism? Is there a certain threshold that begs additional standards of journalistic integrity or is publishing a story in any form make one responsible to fully vet their sources?

However his numerous ethics violations and general unsavoriness has overshadowed what positives he exhibited. He sold the company to AOL, Techcrunch was put under the auspices of the Huffington Group within AOL. Some say it has since taken a decidedly political twist since then, further eroding any semblance of journalistic integrity. See how that whole rumour thing works there?