Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90′s he held his school’s website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he’s taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina’s life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence. What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn’t all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us. Sponsor Where Chris Messina Comes From Chris Messina grew up in a well-to-do suburb in New Hampshire. As a teenager he railed vocally against a middle class culture that he says he now realizes he was very much a part of. One of his biggest influences, though, was a grandmother with strong Libertarian tendencies. When Chris entered high school, the web was in its earliest days. He became the school’s web master, setting up and running its first web site. A group of students at the school wanted to start a Gay/Straight Alliance support group and were facing some resistance from parents and school officials. Messina took it upon himself to post a free banner ad promoting the organization on the school’s official web site. He got suspended from school and pulled the site down in protest. (Even in those early days a school librarian had backed up some of the files, so the situation ended without young Messina being paddled or tied to the rack.) After high school Chris went to college at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied Design. That Design training took him far in the tech world and will be an important part of his new job. After graduating from college, Messina went on to build an incredible resume of accomplishments recognized around the world. He designed the full-page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox. Thousands of people donated $10 each to buy that ad, heralding an Open Source, community-based challenge to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. He co-founded BarCamp , the now international network of technology and culture “unconferences” that you may have heard of and should definitely attend next time there’s one in your town. He was integral in the building of the international co-working community , a network of organizations that help each other serve independent, web-based workers who seek a physical space and support infrastructure. He is a Board member of the OpenID Foundation, the organization working on standards and adoption of open, federated and portable systems of identity for use around the web. He’s a leading voice in the movement to create an Activity Streams standard that will allow user activity data to be shared and understood from one website over to another. When Messina speaks about any of the above, the biggest companies on the web listen. He’s widely respected, but some people say he’s become an arrogant power player at the front of a small parade of outspoken self-appointed leaders. That he gets all the credit when there are other, quieter, people doing a significant portion of the work. That’s one perspective, but it’s not the most common one and many of the leaders of the circle Messina runs in have shipped products that power the fundamentals of the web we all use today. Now Chris Messina will be at one of the biggest and most important companies around. Today on his 29th birthday, Messina announced he was taking a job at Google, with the title Open Web Advocate. Has Chris Messina sold out? “There are many legitimate reasons to work for a larger enterprise,” social web sociologist danah boyd , who recently joined Microsoft, told us in response to Chris’s move. “Some are practical: health insurance, stable income, and all of the other benefits that tend to come with such a package. But some come from the same ethos that entrepreneurs have… the desire to ship a product. Where you don’t have to do every inch of legwork. And where you know that your work can touch millions. There’s also something to be said for being around a whole lot of really smart people.” On Landing at Google Messina has worked at a wide variety of startup companies. Most recently he was at OpenID provider Vidoop, one of a number of high profile hires the company made while it was still based in Oklahoma. In September 2008, Vidoop put its 40 person crew in a crazy caravan to its new headquarters in Portland, Oregon. In May, 2009 the company imploded, closed its doors and told some of its employees it couldn’t pay back wages. Messina shared his account of what happened on his blog. The next half year Messina spent doing independent consulting, including a month and a half project with Mozilla. The fruits of that labor will be released to the public soon, he told us today. In September Messina was making the rounds, talking to a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and told a friend at Google that he was considering joining a big company as his next step. His Google contact told him that the company had a strong preference for hiring engineers, rather than people with the skills that Messina has. Doug Bowman, Google’s first ever staff designer had made a high-profile departure to join Twitter just a few months prior, saying that Google didn’t appreciate design. Messina left feeling like that door was closed and considered launching his own startup company. Over the next few months a few other companies offered Messina positions, he said, but then his old Google contact pinged him again and asked if he was still interested in joining Google. What had changed? His contact told him that Google was placing a new emphasis on getting the social web right, in a way that is good for the web. That month Google publicly launched a campaign that had run informally inside the company for two years, called the Data Liberation Front . It works across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services, a key part of the vision of an Open Distributed Web that Messina has been working toward. “I went in for the interview,” Messina told us today, “and 2 weeks later they made me a great offer letting me do what I was already doing. Yes, the interview process was long but very efficient, and I had to complete 1 logic problem (which I almost nailed, but alas, I’m no Joe Smarr!)” Smarr is the widely respected developer that had been working on these same matters at Comcast Plaxo until announcing that he was joining Google in December. Messina told us that he’s excited to learn how to organize for an Open web from inside a very large company. It’s a perspective he’s never had before, but one that will lend him more credibility in his efforts to move other large companies. What This Means for the Web Messina and Smarr join a growing and impressive roster of Googlers dedicated to building an Open, Distributed web. That’s a vision that’s the opposite of a centralization and control – the typical model of financial success for a large company. This team of people will have to battle inertia, corporate interests and the natural tendency many people say is inherent in a large organization to bring more and more of a market under its control. Google controls a growing size of our search, our advertising sales, our email, our document collaboration, our mapping, our voice communication and much more online. The company is almost sure to face anti-trust legal pressure someday soon . It’s always been a part of Google’s DNA to support what’s good for the web at large, the more people use the web the more they’ll click on AdSense. This much centralization of power is cause for concern, though. It’s as if Google is set to have a battle against itself. It’s staff against the nature of its economy of scale. The culture of the corporation may be more important than its size, though. David Recordon, an open web advocate that works closely with Messina and recently joined social networking giant Facebook, had this to say: “Personally, I love how Facebook’s culture lets me continue working on what I’m passionate about while having a tremendous impact on both the technology industry and the world at large. I hope that as my friend, Chris is able to do the same at Google.” The day to day reality of effecting change may be more complex than that, though. Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth , raises an important concern. “This is clearly a big win for Google,” he told us. “Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space.” “My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. “A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it’s just Google. “While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will ‘sell out’ or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products.” What will going to Google mean for the rebellious young man who’s become such a big personality agitating for the open web outside of the biggest companies on the web? What does it mean that the biggest companies, especially Google and Facebook, keep hiring outside social web technical leaders? Time will tell, but Messina says he’s been told explicitly that people for whom “it’s all about them” don’t do well at Google. The company must be full of formerly big personalities now working as part of a team. PubSubHubbub co-creator and now Googler Brett Slatkin once as a brash college freshman told Newsweek that “If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces.” (That’s one of my favorite quotes.) Now Slatkin has toned it down and talks tech without the bombast. Messina says he knows it’s going to be a big change and is excited to see what being part of Google is like. So the next chapter of the story of Chris Messina will be a part of the next chapter of the story of Google. Next: What could all this look like in the future? See one vision in our article Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy Discuss

Read the original post:
How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha ‘s Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it’s hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May , as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn’t a “Google Killer” and that it has more in common with Wikipedia. Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For? Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram’s Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience. I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the “Google Killer” theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn’t more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha’s similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn’t give into the hype – they stuck to what their goals were. I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things. But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to “pass a test” with “serious users” – by which he means academics and computational users. If it’s useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream. Use Case: Education One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets. A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it “also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions.” Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education – because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that “it’s better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further.” Either way, it’s clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it’s on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There’s no point in the education system pretending it doesn’t exist. If you’re interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to ‘Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.’ Use Case: Computational Journalism This one was described to me as “anomaly spotting.” For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could “automatically enhance news.” Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it’s expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations – including good old blogs. Use Case: Sports Watching Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You’re watching the Friday night game on TV, it’s a close game and you’re curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams – but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc. As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do “chained queries” – queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s. Other Use Cases We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator , Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses – because a lot of health data “can’t be wrong.” He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA? Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches. Conclusion It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data. Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you’re aware of similar computational web apps. See also: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here’s What You Need to Know Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update Discuss

Original post:
Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? “Objective” descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users? Sponsor Editor’s note: In this series, called Redux, we’re re-publishing some of our best posts of 2009. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously – at the expense of everyone else. Background Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the “Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society” in Graz, Austria. She’s now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web. What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines – not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them. The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge. So is it a boy or a girl? When You Assume, You Make an… Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone – so we’ll try to explain her arguments here. Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn’t until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities. Too often, Bath argues, “binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use.” Right: The Semantic Web made me grow this beard. Semantic web t-shirt via SpreadShirt. For example, the Dublin Core ontology concerns Documents. It consists of a list of elements that can be used to describe a document, including “creator,” “contributor,” and “isReferencedBy.” Are there types of relationships that aren’t included on the list but are important to an accurate understanding of a document? There probably are, and different perspectives could help articulate what those relationships might be. For example, some feminist critics argue that the Western cannon of almost every type of literature is full of work that men didn’t give women appropriate credit for. Some argue that Albert Einstein’s wife deserves substantial credit for his theory of relativity – should that be included in semantic markup wherever the book is cataloged? How should that relationship be described? Calling her a contributor would be controversial and wouldn’t really capture the history – a new category may be needed. There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of “minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic.” Is Categorization Itself The Right Solution? The semantic web today is based largely on what are called “triples” – sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin’ the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don’t have any kittens and please don’t send me any.) This way of describing things isn’t beyond question, however. As Bath argues: Even the modeling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes. In other words life aint so simple: people change, conflicts and context matter and things in this world don’t just get their meaning by one object bumping into another, one event leading to another, child inheriting traits from a parent, etc. Computer logic may necessitate simplification of some of life’s richness – but this is nothing to take lightly. We’re talking about helping computers understand meaning and that is not a simple or trivial matter. Is Knowledge Only The Absence of Doubt? Bath calls into question “computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology,” or the belief that way we know that we really “know” something is by having no doubt about it. If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist – ought we conclude that we’ve determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there’s a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth. Repeated attempts to disprove a theory make a much better basis for working knowledge. Or, as political blogger Karoli Kuns said to NPR’s Andy Carvin this morning when Carvin asserted otherwise, “I’d argue that tag dissent balances folksonomies, not undermines.” Let’s talk about “working knowledge” and stop whispering about “truth”, before the robot children hear us. Philosophy Aside, What Does This Mean? It means that as the language we use to communicate meaning to machines develops, we’d better watch out who is building it and what perspectives they take into consideration. Unconsidered assumptions could lead to a real disconnect between the meaning that machines know of the world and they way that millions of other people experience it. Bath isn’t suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. “I am convinced,” she says, “that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace.” She has her own explanation why this is important: “With the use of the Internet we are already witnessing a radical change in practices of how knowledge is represented, stored and spread. In the future most of our work and life will involve the manipulation and use of information. It will crucially depend on the epistemologies, concepts and leading metaphors of the Semantic Web, which direction the semantic “human-machine reconfigurations” (Lucy Suchman) will take.” That’s a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences. There are people who are doing semantic web work in directions that take this into account, but it’s something worth considering for all of us. Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies. Discuss

Continued here:
Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

Opera just released the first pre-alpha version of Opera 10.5. While most users generally only think about Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome as the major players in the current browser wars, there can be no doubt that Opera is working hard to push browser development forward as well. This latest alpha version shows that Opera has worked hard to speed up the browser. Carakan , the new JavaScript engine in Opera 10.5, is up to 7 times faster than Opera’s current engine. The new version of Opera also adds a number of new features like an enhanced private browsing mode and a new graphics engine that can be hardware accelerated. Sponsor The new alpha is currently only available for Windows and OSX users – a Linux version will follow soon. Download links can be found at the bottom of this page . New Features New Features: private browsing better integration with native systems notification messages are now non-modal improvements to the search box and the address box new and improved highlighting new inline page search and password manager Besides the focus on speed – an area where Opera used to lead before WebKit based browsers like Safari and Chrome became popular – the company also included a number of other enhancement in this early version of 10.5. Windows 7 and Vista users, for example, will notice that the browser is now closely integrated with the desktop environment and makes use of features like Aero Glass in Vista and Aero Peek and Jump Lists in Windows 7. On the Mac, Opera can now make use of multi-touch gestures like the 3-finger swipe and Growl notifications. Other new features include a new “private tab” and “private window” mode that actually works far better than similar features in other browsers. You just have to right click on the tab bar and select “private tab” to start the private browsing mode in this new tab, for example. Opera also updated the look and feel for the browser’s inline page search and password manager. It’s All About Speed The focus here for Opera, however, is clearly not so much on bringing new features to the browser (the current Alpha doesn’t even support O pera Unite , for example), but on testing the new JavaScript engine. When we spoke to Opera’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner about the state of the browser during LeWeb earlier this month, he stressed that the company was very focused on improving the speed of the browser. He did stress, however, that the JavaScript engine was only a small part of this effort and that the company was also looking at other bottlenecks that are slowing the browser down. The fact that that new image rendering engine is already pre-wired for hardware acceleration is a good example for this (though the feature isn’t turned on yet). We will bring you more of our interview with von Tetzchner after the holidays. In our own tests, Opera performed remarkably well and this new version clearly shows that it would be unwise to underestimate Opera in the browser wars. We should note, however, that this is still a very early alpha version and that the browser is likely to crash occasionally. Discuss

Read more from the original source:
Opera Feels The Need for Speed: Releases First Pre-Alpha of Opera 10.5

The downturn certainly hasn’t made getting a term sheet an easy endeavor. Many early-stage companies have chosen to forgo traditional investment in favor of participating in incubator programs . This trend is exactly why the TechStars mentorship program is expanding to yet another city. The program just announced plans to launch a Seattle program in the fall of 2010. Sponsor Under the direction of entrepreneur and partner in Seattle’s Founders Co-op Andy Sack, 10 lucky startups will receive seed funding and sage advice from a team of established mentors . Based in Boulder, Boston and soon Seattle, TechStars teams receive $6000 dollars per founder for a maximum of 3 founders. From here, the program claims a 6% equity stake in your company and trains you to run a sustainable startup. Some well known program graduates include location-based network Brightkite , Twitter app store oneforty and surveillance service ReTel Technologies . Seattle program participants will benefit from the successes of past graduates as well as hear from entrepreneurs and investors including Managing Director of Voyager Capital Erik Benson, CEO of

Read the original:
TechStars Expands to Seattle

The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions . That’s exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today. We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome. Sponsor Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser’s bug tracking system – it’s something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect. Now those extensions are here and it’s a very interesting story. Understanding the Versions of Chrome Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here’s how it breaks down: Chromium is open source developer channel, “the bleeding edge” of Chrome development. That’s what we’ve been using here on Mac and it’s the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It’s untested and less stable than the other versions. We’ve been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems. Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev , beta ( Windows or Mac ) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today. Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions. Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon Some of Nick Baum’s Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far Aviary – screen capture and image editing Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer Google Translate – truly, a wonder to behold Brizzly – an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum’s former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen Right now the official extension gallery won’t allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler , for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium. Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it’s anyone’s guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?) Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you’re on a Mac it’s probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well. Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically. Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that’s made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That’s a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can’t slow or crash the others. It’s an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it’s great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way. GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey . These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you’re on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey. What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman , the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That’s right, on the Chrome Extensions team. Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven’t found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac. Red Hot APIs On the Way Baum told us today that the team “will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways.” That sounds great. It’s one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it’s a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web. Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it’s hard not to give it a serious try. It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It’s being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out! Discuss

Read more:
5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions

About 18 months ago, we wrote about an obscure search startup from Germany called FAROO . We believed that its radical alternative, using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, had a shot at being a real disruptive force. Today, it has made some progress, has raised some money and is getting out into the market. (Disclosure: FAROO is currently a ReadWriteWeb sponsor). FAROO is wisely underplaying P2P in its marketing, preferring more fashionable terms such as “real-time search” and “social discovery.” But the P2P technology drives it. Sponsor So, we decided to invite someone who understands P2P at a technical level to interview Wolf Garbe, FAROO’s founder. Our tech expert, Kiril Pertsev, of Agily Networks , has already written about P2P for us in the past . Kiril: Why .NET? Did you already have development resources or did you make this choice because you consider it a better option for networked desktop applications? Would you make this choice again? And if you’re not satisfied with .NET, what would your platform of choice be, given all of your experience over the past few years? Wolf: I come from Delphi (Object Pascal). So, the choice of C#/.NET was a dedicated decision for a new platform, not driven by legacy. When I started to work on the first prototype in 2004, Delphi moved towards .NET. I preferred to go with the original, especially because the development of C# was led by Anders Hejlsberg, the designer of Borland’s Turbo Pascal (which Delphi derived from). Of course, I also looked into Java, which I found quite similar, both from the language perspective (C# vs. Java) and the JIT Runtime environment (Java Virtual Machine vs. .NET Runtime). The decision for C# was based on the dominating desktop market share of Windows and the assumption that embedding the .NET framework into the OS would ensure fast penetration of .NET. This only partially came true, partly due to the limited success of Vista, which was the first Windows version with .NET pre-installed. Kiril: Doesn’t this choice hinder your ability to move to Mac and Linux platforms. Wolf: We were betting on Mono for platform compatibility. Unfortunately, Mac OS X still has no Mono application launcher, other than starting with the terminal, which is not feasible for a mass market. With the increasing importance of the Mac OS X platform, I expect this to change. Silverlight today is already natively available for Mac. For the ultimate platform independence, we are also continually observing the diverse RIA developments (AJAX, AIR, Silverlight, Mozilla Prism, HTML 5 persistent web storage, Mozilla’s DOM storage, Google Gears and Flash persistent storage), which could one day allow us to remove the download and installation step for P2P. But so far, no solution meets all of the requirements: out-of-browser capability, permanent background operation, auto-start option, tray icon support, cross-domain connection support, persistent storage, accepting an incoming connection and receiving data and NAT traversal. Kiril: If you become dissatisfied with .NET, what would be your next platform of choice. Wolf: Although not everything went as expected, I still believe that .NET is a very powerful platform, and C# as a language is evolving at a much faster and broader pace than Java. Today, we have a good .NET penetration rate in the US and Europe. With Windows 7, I expect that to increase in Asia as well. Kiril: I see that you’re using a pretty simple P2P communication technology instead of sophisticated Hamachi-like NAT traversal using UDP hole punching. Wolf: I suppose you are referring to the transport layer, which is HTTP over TCP/IP. The real P2P overlay protocol on top of that is not that simple anymore. Because our distributed search engine system architecture breaks with almost all legacy paradigms, we thought it would be a good idea that it be at least based on proven and widely used standards wherever possible. There are several reasons for this: It reduces complexity and development time. It improves compatibility (there is probably no protocol more widely used than HTTP over Port 80). It’s unlikely that this connectivity will break anytime soon by changes in protocols, OS, drivers or hardware. Behaving like a standard browser from the protocol view makes the application less vulnerable to filtering, blocking or traffic shaping and ensures that it even works in most corporate environments. NAT traversal is the most critical issue for every P2P application. It’s really a shame that although the Internet is built on a distributed foundation, end-to-end connectivity between users in a decentralized way is completely broken . We are using several NAT traversal techniques: Manual Port Forwarding, Automatic Port Forwarding via UPnP and Teredo. Teredo is a IPv6 Tunneling technology , standardized according to RFC4380 . Teredo is part of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7; with Miredo , there is also an open-source implementation for Linux and Mac OS X available. Microsoft reports that with Teredo, the chance of a connection between two peers increases from 15% to 84% (PDF link). Our observations are somewhere between 60% and 70%. Teredo is quite sophisticated technology and is a more universal approach. It provides connectivity at the OS level, in contrast to having several applications in use, where each uses its own proprietary traversal technology. Kiril: Could you please elaborate on choosing network technology, having achieved a substantial number of users and collecting usage statistics. Do you know how many active and passive peers you have at any given time? What is the ratio? Wolf: We have solid insight into the state of our P2P network. We know the number of active and passive peers on any given day (using the log from our update server). The active peer ratio is between 60 and 70%. We are also currently working on an improved distributed intraday statistic. (The distributed statistic currently built into the P2P client is not valid anymore for the increased network size. For scalability, every peer has only a limited view of the whole network, which requires more advanced methods for calculating the actual network size.) Kiril: Your search index essentially is a distributed storage system with DHT addressing, right? Wolf: Yes. Kiril: Have you thought about other uses of such technology, beyond search: back-up, private distributed storage, file-sharing, etc. (like Wuala )? In a publication from 2001 (in German), in which I also outlined the idea of a peer-to-peer search engine, this was part of an integrated solution with a P2P Web server, P2P file-sharing and a P2P anonymizer. Due to various legal copyright issues, we are currently not looking into file-sharing. But from a technological standpoint, a distributed storage system is quite universal, from storing a search engine index to attention data, Web pages, instant messages, social network profiles, micro-blogging messages, back-ups and files. Kiril: Could you please share your vision of the mythical “P2P operating system,” now that we already have P2P networking, P2P processing, P2P storage and P2P applications (like search). Wolf: P2P and distributed architectures are a universal principle that the whole Internet is built upon. Unfortunately, distributed technologies like Mail, IRC, Usenet and even independent Web servers are being increasingly replaced by centralized solutions (the cloud, Google Wave, etc.). Despite the obvious short-term convenience, this leads to long-term monopolies and dependencies and makes the Internet infrastructure more vulnerable in terms of reliability and political influence. I believe that a solid, standardized P2P stack integrated in the operating system can fix the broken end-to-end connectivity between users, enabling the use of an endless amount of latent storage, memory, processor cycles and bandwidth. Distributed storage is certainly a core component, as is distributed processing to make more sense of all of the data. On top of this, there should be a distributed programming framework, which enables the development of distributed applications and the distribution and aggregations of tasks in a standardized manner (e.g. the distributed version of MapReduce/Hadoop is part of this). A distributed attention data repository, shared by all applications, but under full user control. There should be resource management that puts the user in full control of the amount of resources she or he would like to dedicate to a particular distributed project—possibly combined with a ratio system and/or virtual currency to maintain a healthy usage to contribution ratio. Distributed identity management and authentication, authorization and access control. This could replace most of the centralized cloud solutions by delivering the same convenience and scalability in a decentralized way. BOINC (the universal distributed processing platform where seti@home runs today) goes partially in that direction. This is partially because the peers contribute, by taking tasks from a centralized server and providing results back to this server. But this system is not fully distributed, nor are the results intended to be used by the peers themselves. Kiril: Do you encounter scalability issues? Do you have any single point of failure resources in your P2P network? How reliable is it—meaning, what percentage of the network could you lose without seriously degrading search quality and performance? Wolf: We have scaled the P2P network in a controlled way. While we have made some scalability-related adjustments to our P2P protocol, the core algorithms proved that there are no inherent scalability limits. Due to our fully distributed architecture, we have no single point of failure. We have twenty-fold redundancy of each item, which replicates automatically if peers leave the network. Only if all 20 copies of the item are removed at the same time would this piece of information be lost. This leads to a mean information lifetime of 120 years under realistic churn (i.e. the peers randomly joining and abandoning the network temporarily or permanently). This is more than sufficient for search, where 50% of the information changes during the year (and is therefore refreshed anyway at a much higher rate). Kiril: Do you think that “mobile P2P” is feasible? What would you say about implementing P2P search (or any other application) on, say, the iPhone? Are mobile terminals ready for P2P? Are cell networks ready? Do they have enough CPU power, etc? Wolf: Today, we distinguish between mobile connectivity and landlines. But I believe this separation will fade away. Device performance, bandwidth and flat-rate pricing structures will become close. While today, processor cycles, memory and bandwidth in mobile phones are too precious for wide use of P2P applications, this will change. Even “walling off” tendencies and restrictive App Store policies will be liberated by regulation or user demand. But much more interesting than bringing file-sharing to the iPhone will be P2P applications that use mobility, possibly combined with GPS, distributed camera/augmented reality and RFID. This will bring P2P technology into completely new application fields. Think of distributed traffic control (peers could be users with iPhones in cars or the cars themselves) or applications to lead crowds of people at large public events or in disaster zones, as well as gaming, distributed weather and earthquake prognosis . Bluetooth could even make this independent of cell networks. Global communication between peers would be asynchronous through moving people . Also, cell network and Bluetooth mashups would be possible. In the near future, we will provide Web access to our P2P Web search for mobile users. They will just be passive users of the resources contributed by active PC users. Kiril: What is your vision of the P2P road map? Apparently, the first “killer P2P application” was file-sharing, Kazaa, then BitTorrent. Given that the next one is search, what would be the next after that? Wolf: As I mentioned, instead of another isolated P2P application, I would like to see P2P built into the OS and Internet stack in a standardized manner. So that an application can benefit from P2P without any specific effort, in the same easy and natural way that applications today use the Internet (HTTP, AJAX and JSON). Then, P2P technology would become ubiquitous and part of almost every application. Every application that uses cloud services today could benefit from such P2P technology. An example would be a distributed platform for micro-blogging services and social networks, heralding the end of walled gardens. But my personal vision is to combine P2P with the next thing after search. Twenty years ago, I wrote a small expert system on my C64 (today, a C64 emulator is on the iPhone!), using Predicate Logic and an Eliza -style natural-language interface. So, you could tell the system, ” All cats have claws. All tigers are cats. ” And then you could ask the system, ” Do tigers have claws? ” And it would answer, ” Yes! ” You could retrieve information and relationships that were not explicitly stored (or that anyone was even aware existed). At that time I had to enter every bit of information manually. Today, almost all information on earth is accessible on the Internet, together with comments and conversation streams. Predicate logic would be supported by fuzzy logic, statistical machine learning and more. Today, known translations are used to translate untranslated text. But this could be much more universal: using known connections in one field to explain unknown correlations in another . Such a system could autonomously formulate queries, combine facts, fill in the missing link in a theory to prove or falsify it. So, I think the next step after search will be reasoning; and in combination with P2P technology and distributed processing, this may bring us a kind of global brain. A brain that not only stores and retrieves information but that is capable of cognition and conclusion at a giant scale. It will discover hidden correlations and unknown facts and will answer questions with answers that cannot be found in any document. You can see, this is much more HAL than the next Google. Kiril: What technical feature of your technology are you most proud of? 100+ patents must something. Wolf: Most crucial has been to ensure both a quick response time and complete results for queries with multiple terms and phrases (only 15% of searches are single keywords) in a completely distribute P2P architecture. For queries with multiple keywords, we eliminated the need for the intersection of huge posting lists across different peers. While we had to invent a lot of things—just because they hadn’t been done before in a way that was required for distributed search—they are not all patented (so, we don’t own 100+ patents). Prior to funding, this would have been impossible financially. Kiril: How is your real-time search related to the P2P search? Does it also run on a distributed network? If so, then how do peers communicate results to the front page of the FAROO website? Wolf: Currently, we use a hybrid architecture. While we are building up our P2P network and use it for general Web search, in parallel we use a central index for the real-time data. The focus on the most recent and popular Web pages keeps the costs moderate. Attention data collected by FAROO peers serves also for real-time discovery and ranking (in addition to analyzing the Twitter stream). But we believe in a holistic approach. Our real-time search will evolve into an integral part of Web search and be fully based on our P2P architecture . There will still be a gateway/proxy server that enables Web access to our P2P network for those users not able or ready to install a P2P client (e.g. for mobile). Discuss

See original here:
Technical Q&A With FAROO Founder