BlackTech Blog

Appropriately, the scariest day for Facebook comes today on Halloween in the form of a post from Ning’s Marc Andreessen announcing Google’s Open Social open web API that will essentially kill the app development momentum of Facebook developers. Open Social will allow these developers to create social networking apps across various platforms, without being hemmed in by the walled garden that is Facebook. Included in the initial rollout are Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning

Andreessen explains it best when he says, “With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — those languages and APIs don’t work anywhere other than Facebook — and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.”

Translation: Mark Zuckerberg should have accepted one of those early multi-billion dollar offers long ago, because now it’s game over. That $240 million that Microsoft just sunk into Facebook for 1.6 percent of the company will never actually materialize into the $15 billion valuation being tossed around.

I pointed out that Facebook was just the latest “hot club” months ago on Wired in the The Law of Diminishing Coolness. Now Google’s move with Open Social will prove this law to be truer than even Zuckerburg might have guessed.

DAMAGE TALLY:
-Unlikely Winner: Steve Ballmer
-New Zuckerberg Nickname: Bubbleboy
-Biggest VC blunder: Facebook app funds
-Repurcussions: Expect a Facebook sale announcement before the end of the year (that’s 60 days if you’re counting)

P.S. If you’re one of the adventurers out there actually betting against Google… well, I’d like to talk to you as soon as possible regarding the sale of an extremely undervalued bridge that will soon be for sale.

Photo by SVB

wysiwysell posted a photo:

T-Mobile

wysiwysell posted a photo:

T-Mobile

If the size of your .image file has gotten very large without you having saved much work, it is probably due to lingering circular or global references to objects. These objects are referred to as zombies and can enter a zombie state for a host of reasons, but I’ll cover that on my Squeak blog later and link back to here. For now, let’s just deal with how to get rid of them. The first thing to do is to open a Workspace and evaluate:

CroquetHarness cleanup

Next save the image and see if the file size shrunk back to a reasonable level. If not you’ll either have to go zombie hunting or start from a clean image. Sometimes zombie hunting doesn’t produce the results you want. It may be that you’re not looking for the right kind of objects but in other cases, there are just too many zombies of different types and it’s taking a long time to figure out how to untangle them. In either case, if you don’t have any data or graphics bound only to the image, AND your code is reasonably well organized(this doesn’t have to mean Monticello - some projects can be managed well with change sets) the quickest solution may be to just dump the code and load it into a clean image. However, one often learns valuable lessons while zombie hunting so there’s good reason to learn some basic techniques. (more…)

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay @ Creative Think Seminar 1982

Related Links:
Water and Ice

Intel The Software Company

Cisco The Software Company

In any Squeak environment, the Object Explorer can help you learn how things work. The following link has a step-by-step, illustrated example:

Often in Squeak, whenever there’s interaction with the UI, the most direct path to understanding starts with the morph you are clicking. You can cmd-click(Mac) or right-click (Windows) on any morph to bring up a set of icons called a halo.

Getting Started With Croquet 

* For folk not familiar with Star Wars, see the Force 

The blogosphere is abuzz with PloppSL - even the critics say it’s cool and hope it gets better. A number of folks point out that it’s free and does something very useful. I’d add that it’s also not a 1.0 release yet. Here are some representative links:

Shiny Life(detailed step-by-step video tutorial)

New World Notes: Sculpties Made Simple

Plopp Second Life: Even a child can do sculpties 

3Greeneggs: Plopp has potential but flops

A new version of Plopp, the Croquet-based 3D painting tool mentioned here this past spring is now available for use with Second Life:

PloppSL allows you to create intriguing Sculpted Prims for SecondLife™ easily. Both texture and model are created in one step. Simply paint the front and back side of your model and it will be converted to a Sculpted Prim by PloppSL.

Second Plopp

Ramon Leon makes some good points about the “out of the box” Squeak UI and I agree that marketing is important. However, like most folk relatively new to Smalltalk/Squeak and strangely many who’ve been around a long time, he’s been misinformed about why Smalltalk isn’t more widely used. Smalltalk was not beaten by either Java or Ruby, but rather failed to address the needs these languages did in a timely manner. It may be a while before I find time to finish up the long, detailed essay on this topic that’s been sitting dormant so for now let me put it in a nutshell.

It is a matter of record that Java was not originally designed to compete with Smalltalk as a generic application development tool, but rather C/C++ for set top devices. Before Java’s public release, the momentum in the corporate world had clearly shifted to Smalltalk over C++. Java wasn’t publicly released until 1995 and early in the year didn’t even enter into the language discussion. Nor was Java mentioned when Digitalk and ParcPlace merged later that year. In fact, at the end of 1995, IBM which had only recently licensed Java was still touting VisualAge over Java for the web! At the time the Java Enterprise Edition Platform spec was announced in 1998, none of the incompatible Smalltalk offerings from a stagnant ParcPlace-Digitalk, an indifferent IBM, a research-oriented Squeak, or single platform Object-Arts was really focused on delivering internet aware solutions. Java and Ruby merely stepped in and filled a vacuum.

Update: It is true that ParcPlace-Digitalk’s VisualWave was a powerful offering in some respects. However, it was an expensive and all-encompassing approach with no free stepping stones or incremental building blocks. In contrast, Java developers could download the JDK, explore and learn.

When you look at the 35 languages that rank above Smalltalk on the TIOBE Index(also relevant is O’Reilly’s Programming Language Trends ), marketing doesn’t really seem to be a primary differentiator. If one is seeking to expand the use of Smalltalk, I think it’s necessary to broaden the context ultimately to include the evolution of hardware and also give more weight to it’s ancestral meme. Many of the languages ranked ahead of Smalltalk owe a great deal of their success to ideas made popular by Smalltalk. Things that can be done to achieve more widespread use of Smalltalk will be the topic of my next “Smalltalk Reloaded” entry but I’ll say in closing that embracing Sun Labs Lively Kernel is one of them.

Steve Wessels has a very thorough, step-by-step example of how to develop Squeak applications.

The Squeak browser has what are called “optional buttons” which I find indispensable.

Each of these buttons saves you at least one click and most cases several. The “inheritance” button has color codings which provide information that’s very time consuming to get at. In my experiences, one almost always needs a few of these capabilities during a programming session. They do take up screen real estate but for many it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

In order to show these buttons you need to select “optional buttons” in the browsing section of preferences. If you don’t already know how to do this read the rest of this entry. (more…)

I’m most pleased to report (although somewhat belatedly) that HP (Hewlett-Packard) has joined the Croquet Consortium as a founding member and that HP Labs’ Rick McGeer is serving on our growing Board of Directors.

Julian Lombardi’s Blog: HP Joins the Consortium!

Matthew Schmidt has provided a nice intro to launching a Croquet world programmatically. If you found it helpful you may want to view(or review) these pages from the Croquet Consortium site while waiting for his next installment:

• Getting Started: Starting Croquet
• Programming: Simple World

If you’re itching for more right now, you might try to understand what the quick and dirty path has in common with the route taken by Simple World. To do that you need to find out where and how the SimpleWorld class is used. (more…)

So the Wikimedia Foundation is moving to Silicon Valley to join the Web 2.0 fun, but meanwhile a very exciting part of the empire has quietly fallen by the wayside—OpenServing. Wikia announced the site late last year as a major initiative to allow anyone to create a social media website complete with RSS and Digg-like voting features already mixed in. The key was that all the server space was to be given away for free and site creators would be allowed to keep 100 percent of their ad revenue.

At the time, Wikia founder Jimmy Wales (pictured above) said, “People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident - as we always have been - that the wisdom of our community will prevail.”

So a few days ago I visited the site to see if any new developments had occurred and was shocked (and disappointed) when I was met with several dead links and no access to the content sites that had been planned. The idea for OpenServing was exciting and I had high hopes for the project. After searching in vain for any sign of OpenServing life on the Internet I reached out to Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley for some answers.

Beesley was extremely gracious yet frank when she told me, “The OpenServing effort was never very popular or successful despite a lot of press attention around its launch, so it has really dropped in our priority list and I don’t expect an awful lot to happen with it over the next few months as we’re focusing efforts on developing new features for the main part of our site, which is wikia.com, and on the upcoming search engine due for release in December.”

And as for all those who got excited about launching something on OpenServing… “If you’re interested in starting a wiki, I would suggest you use requests.wikia.com rather than OpenServing. Although the deal with the Google ads isn’t available there, all of the content is released under a free license, so you are welcome to monetize it in other ways, such as by reusing the content on another site, or by selling copies of the content produced or related merchandize.”

So while Wikia hasn’t officially shuttered OpenServing, it’s clear from Beesley’s comments that the project is a non-starter, which is a shame. OpenServing was big picture thinking along the right lines and could have fostered a number of interesting content offerings. Perhaps with more of the Wikia family now moving to San Francisco the group’s next launch will draw more energy–and users–from the local geek community. Hopefully, none of this will stop Jimbo from continuing to launch interesting and forwarding thinking experiments.

Photo by Puggles

The big chatter today is focused on Google’s acquisition of Twitter competitor Jaiku. Not interested. Twitter has the attention. Pownce and Jaiku are nice, but not as exciting and energized.

So let’s talk about another potentially seismic event in technology: the fast growing momentum of free music from recording artists. By now the story about Radiohead’s free album give-away is well known to most music fans. But today another report came out of the UK that indicates rock supergroup Oasis and funk-pop star Jamiroquai (pictured above) are making noises that they’ll release they music for free as well. Both groups are without recording contracts and have huge fan bases worldwide. Now that Radiohead has shown this move isn’t career suicide, we may see a lot more of this distribution method, something I predicted about seven years ago.

I have a lot more to say about this free distribution movement, and I intend to back my words up with actions, very soon. But for now let’s just say that any music business executive not already planning a radical business model change in the wake of recent events is… obsolete.

Photo by radio1interactive