Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Zooomer, Firefox and CoComment issue ...
If you are a Zooomr user through Firefox you should be aware that installing the CoComment plug-in seems to cause a problem with editing of photo title and GeoTagging photos. Hopefully one or the other company will sort this out soon as both are excellent services.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Web Scale Applications ...
The other night I met up with some of the people I used to work with in my previous job. For all its faults that job had one highlight and that was the people that I worked with. It was great to catch up with so many of them and swap many stories of the places that we all now worked.
Amongst the many non-geeky conversations that were had that night there were of course many very geeky ones, one of them was a great discussion of Web Scale Applications. In case that term is completely unfamiliar to you let me explain a little. When you are working at your computer and you use an application like Outlook to check your e-mail, offline, the application is running locally, just on your computer. The programmers who wrote that program could predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy the amount of work that it would be expected to do. They knew, for example, that there would only be one person using it at a time, they could analyse the way people use e-mail and come up with a usable set of figures to suggest how many e-mails people would have listed on screen at any one time. By understanding the expected workload the programmers can write code that works best at that level.
When you check your e-mail at work, whilst you are probably still using Outlook on your local machine, however it will also be connecting to an e-mail server. This will be supporting all the users within the company which could be 10, or a few hundred or several thousand. This unknown puts a little more stress on the developer as they have to code to a much bigger window of expected performance. Such software is said to be Enterprise grade (assuming that it works properly). There is hope for our poor developer though, as it is not unreasonable to state maximum acceptable performance for such software, for example stating that it will only support up to 2000 users and that after that point the company must have a second server to cope.
The classic example of Web Scale Applications is online web mail, e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail etc. These applications have to support a completely unknown level of usage, the maximum of which could be everyone on the Internet, a figure that grows by the minute.
There is little in the way of standard practice when producing a Web Scale Application, it is quite a new field and something very hard to test in a lab. So whatever is out there about this type of work is of great interest to geeks like us. I mentioned a few articles I knew on the subject to people the other night and promised that I would post links to them here, so here they are;
The are all fascinating accounts of how people approached some of the web scale issues in very different ways. There still needs to be a lot more work on all of this in general, but then it is not something that is easy to assess.
Amongst the many non-geeky conversations that were had that night there were of course many very geeky ones, one of them was a great discussion of Web Scale Applications. In case that term is completely unfamiliar to you let me explain a little. When you are working at your computer and you use an application like Outlook to check your e-mail, offline, the application is running locally, just on your computer. The programmers who wrote that program could predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy the amount of work that it would be expected to do. They knew, for example, that there would only be one person using it at a time, they could analyse the way people use e-mail and come up with a usable set of figures to suggest how many e-mails people would have listed on screen at any one time. By understanding the expected workload the programmers can write code that works best at that level.
When you check your e-mail at work, whilst you are probably still using Outlook on your local machine, however it will also be connecting to an e-mail server. This will be supporting all the users within the company which could be 10, or a few hundred or several thousand. This unknown puts a little more stress on the developer as they have to code to a much bigger window of expected performance. Such software is said to be Enterprise grade (assuming that it works properly). There is hope for our poor developer though, as it is not unreasonable to state maximum acceptable performance for such software, for example stating that it will only support up to 2000 users and that after that point the company must have a second server to cope.
The classic example of Web Scale Applications is online web mail, e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail etc. These applications have to support a completely unknown level of usage, the maximum of which could be everyone on the Internet, a figure that grows by the minute.
There is little in the way of standard practice when producing a Web Scale Application, it is quite a new field and something very hard to test in a lab. So whatever is out there about this type of work is of great interest to geeks like us. I mentioned a few articles I knew on the subject to people the other night and promised that I would post links to them here, so here they are;
- Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Database War Stories series
- Web 2.0 and Databases Part 1: Second Life
- Database War Stories #2: bloglines and memeorandum
- Database War Stories #3: Flickr
- Database War Stories #4: NASA World Wind
- Database War Stories #5: craigslist
- Baseline: Inside MySpace.com
- Baseline: How Google works
How to build a WebFountain: An architecture for very large-scale text analytics
The are all fascinating accounts of how people approached some of the web scale issues in very different ways. There still needs to be a lot more work on all of this in general, but then it is not something that is easy to assess.
Friday, December 29, 2006
When will we take web video live ...
It has been a huge year for video on the web; Google buying You Tube; cover of Time magazine; launch of the Edwards campaign etc. So what will the next trick be? In the spirit of New Year predictions from opinionated bloggers I am throwing this into the ring.
Redistribution of streaming video.
Web 2.0 is not just about the funky technologies such as AJAX, it is also, in a large way, about bringing people into the network, about the conversations between people. With the current generation of web video applications the conversation is still languishing in the realm of comments and forums, asynchronous posting. In this current era of Instant Messaging and Blackberry addicted mobile workers this is not going to be good enough for long.
At some point in 2007 one of the big web video players, or some small outfit out to disrupt the market, will cotton onto this and launch a product that will allow people to stream live video to the web.
Obviously this can be done now, but not on the web scale. It is at the moment in the same state that web video was in 2005. People can stream live content on a personal, small scale only.
This is not going to be a separate function, but instead will enhance their current offerings. Shows will be recorded and offered in the same way that web video currently is, but the live aspect will create an event experience which is missing.
I have for some time being struggling to find a way to express this idea better, and I'm still not there yet so any suggestions on how to do this better would be welcome. However right now the best way I can say this is that it is the difference between a collective experience and a shared experience.
Right now web video is at the collective experience stage, where people browse the videos on offer, find something great and recommend it to friends. Collectively people have then viewed this video and talk about it, spurring new ideas.
With the launch of a live video platform people will be able to have a shared experience, where everyone can see something at the same time. This is like the difference between TV and DVD. It is an important difference.
What difference would such a platform make, would people use it? Well ask yourself what Ask A Ninja would be like as a live phone in show? How many parents working away from home would appreciate being able to see little Timmy's football game as it happens? These are shared experiences.
The only project on the horizon that seems even close to doing this is The Project Venice from the team that brought us Skype, but they don't seem to be targeting the User Generated Content market.
Finally, one of the driving forces for a change like this would be financial. Currently people have not cracked the web video advertising problem, this model is one that is more closely related to the current TV advertising model.
Well that's it. My take on a major change for 2007. What's yours?
Updated 30/12/2006: Forgot to mention, iCal would be the RSS of this new live world.
Redistribution of streaming video.
Web 2.0 is not just about the funky technologies such as AJAX, it is also, in a large way, about bringing people into the network, about the conversations between people. With the current generation of web video applications the conversation is still languishing in the realm of comments and forums, asynchronous posting. In this current era of Instant Messaging and Blackberry addicted mobile workers this is not going to be good enough for long.
At some point in 2007 one of the big web video players, or some small outfit out to disrupt the market, will cotton onto this and launch a product that will allow people to stream live video to the web.
Obviously this can be done now, but not on the web scale. It is at the moment in the same state that web video was in 2005. People can stream live content on a personal, small scale only.
This is not going to be a separate function, but instead will enhance their current offerings. Shows will be recorded and offered in the same way that web video currently is, but the live aspect will create an event experience which is missing.
I have for some time being struggling to find a way to express this idea better, and I'm still not there yet so any suggestions on how to do this better would be welcome. However right now the best way I can say this is that it is the difference between a collective experience and a shared experience.
Right now web video is at the collective experience stage, where people browse the videos on offer, find something great and recommend it to friends. Collectively people have then viewed this video and talk about it, spurring new ideas.
With the launch of a live video platform people will be able to have a shared experience, where everyone can see something at the same time. This is like the difference between TV and DVD. It is an important difference.
What difference would such a platform make, would people use it? Well ask yourself what Ask A Ninja would be like as a live phone in show? How many parents working away from home would appreciate being able to see little Timmy's football game as it happens? These are shared experiences.
The only project on the horizon that seems even close to doing this is The Project Venice from the team that brought us Skype, but they don't seem to be targeting the User Generated Content market.
Finally, one of the driving forces for a change like this would be financial. Currently people have not cracked the web video advertising problem, this model is one that is more closely related to the current TV advertising model.
Well that's it. My take on a major change for 2007. What's yours?
Updated 30/12/2006: Forgot to mention, iCal would be the RSS of this new live world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)