The hype is building and this is both good and bad for Google. When something gets so hyped up it can be hard to meet expectations. People who don’t usually follow techy things are mentioning Android. Let’s face it, everyone loves Google and for a lot of people they have changed the way we use the Internet. For a smaller number of us Google has changed how we do email, how we work with documents and how we stay organized with its plethora of tools and widgets. Google has become the Swiss Army knife for the Internet, so of course we have high hopes for Android.
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I have a great Wordpress plugin called CyStats. This allows me to see in real time who is visiting or crawling my blog. I recently started posting my blog entries to Twitter and noticed two web crawlers called HTTP://TWITTURLS.COM and TWITTURLY/V0.5. Later a friend sent me a link to Twitturly and that led to finding Twitturls. These sites were the source of the crawlers.
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Here are some photos of last nights Toronto Firefox Launch Party, thanks to Lee for bringing a camera, the rest of us forgot to bring one!
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I just got back from the Mozilla Firefox launch party in Toronto and I must say it was way cooler than I thought it would be. Geeks descended from all over Toronto. We got free beer, free tshirts, free food, free desserts and all kinds of free FireFox items. The whole night was really fun and I met a lot of really cool people.
Myself and two of my co-workers showed up a little after 6pm and spent the night hanging out with fellow geeks. I got to ask lots of questions about Mozilla and Firefox. I didn’t even know they had an office in Toronto before tonight. They expected 40 people to show up to the party and got over 120. The computers and large LCD screen had real time stats of the downloads happening in several countries. At one point it was over 5000 firefox downloads per minute. At the time of this writing Asia had still not woken up for Firefox download day and I’m sure it’s well over 3 million downloads at the time of this post. The Mozilla IRC channel was very active too, and I think their were web cams covering the event, because the chat seemed to be talking about us.
I also couldn’t help but think of how great a marketing strategy this and other parties are. You get 140 uber geeks together, give them some food and drinks and then have them all go home and talk about Firefox on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is viral marketing at its best.
I hope to have some pictures of the party up soon, but I didn’t have a camera on me. Luckily, a friend of mine did! So I should have some soon. Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet, what are you waiting for?
Download Day 2008 is a really cool viral marketing campaign on the Spread Firefox website. You can see the current stats on the Download Day 2008 website. Total pledges at the time of this posting were 1,243,370. You can also see how many pledges each country has on the world map. The official download day for Firefox 3 is Tuesday June 17th.
The goal is to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours. So pledge now and download it on Monday and “Enjoy a Better Web”. Oh, and if you really want to geek out, don’t forget about the Firefox parties all over the world, you can find one on mozillaparty.com.
Update June 18th: It looks like the iPhone search volume has completely spiked, surpassing original spikes, but I still think there’s a lot of saturation in the blog sphere. I will do a follow up after the phone is released.
Today I have been playing around with Google Trends and the BlogPulse tools. While trending some of the newest smartphones out there I noticed something odd with the iPhone data. It seems that last week when the new iPhone was announced there was actually a far larger spike in iPhone news than actual interest.
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A friend of mine has launched his long anticipated Geeks In Training website. It is intended to fill a niche in computer training for, as he says “the not-too-puzzled”. It strives to bring context to many of today’s technology challenges, the when and why you should be using a technology. It is not intended to be a bleeding edge site, nor is it for total beginners, it’s something in between for the every day geek, and a real geek is always in training. It will also help people who have started their training, but wish to take that final plunge into full Geekdom.
Eventually there will be more writers, and I hope to contribute in the near future. With so many technologies merging together we are being bombarded at every level. You may be an expert in one area, but you may need to bridge the gap to another that you are less familiar with, this is where Geeks In Training comes in. I really look forward to watching this site grow as it is still in the early stages of what will soon be something much bigger. I recommend reading the Welcome to Geeks In Training article for a more indepth overview of what the site is all about.
I’ve been following Google’s Android platform on and off for awhile now, but lately the buzz is starting to pick up. For those not in the know, Android is Google’s new software platform for mobile phones.
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.
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Continuing on the browser theme, the spread Firefox website has a really cool viral campaign going on right now. Firefox is of course the awesome browser that is now rivaling Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The site looks great and the idea behind Download Day 2008 is for people to make a pledge to download Firefox 3 the day it comes out and help set the Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloaded in a 24 hour period.
All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.
The really neat thing about the site is the map of the world. You can roll over any country and see how many pledges they have so far; come on Canada! At the time of this writing the United States has the most pledges, but what I find really interesting is the next closest countries which are Brazil, Poland, Japan and Germany. It will be really interesting to see who comes out with the most downloads on release day. Right now the total stands at 231,189, lets get this number growing! Go and make your pledge now, lets get more standards compliant web browsers out there, and besides, Firefox is just a great browser anyway. If you really want to get involved, you can also check out the Get Involved section where you can find idea’s on how to spread the word to other people.
For my thoughts on current web browsers see Choosing the wrong web browser.
A lot of people are afraid of open source software (OSS). They say things like what about support, what happens if I need help or what happens if this OSS project disappears in the future. I think these fears are unfounded and actually apply more to closed source software. With closed source you invest in a product and are always at the mercy of its development team for fixes and updates. Usually you have no access to the code, and you rely on someone else’s employees and know how. The company regardless of size could stop development of the software at anytime, and if it’s a small company could even disappear all together.
With open source, sure you need know how to get it up and running and in many cases you need to know this for closed source options too, but instead of dumping money into a product you can dump money into your own people and build up knowledge of the application internally. If you have smart developers they will fix your problems, and they will usually be able to do it a lot faster and easier than they could with closed source products. You will have full access to the code, and if something isn’t working the way you intended or doesn’t even exist within the current framework, your developers can fix it or add it. In some cases you may even be able to find an OSS plugin or addon to the product you are using. You will also have access to the OSS community support, which is usually far more helpful and rich than any closed source manual or solution could ever hope to be. Just do a search on any popular OSS project and you will find a mountain of resources at your finger tips. The same cannot be said for closed source.
Having used both open source and closed source, I can definitively say I have seen more time and man hours poured into closed source solutions than I have ever seen put into open source. Of course there is always the possibility of choosing the wrong OSS solution, but this is the other great thing about OSS, if you do find that you have made a mistake, you can scrap it and try something else. Now what happens when you make the same mistake with a closed source solution? It’s usually not even an option to scrap it if you have spent a lot of money on the product, you may just have to deal with it and work with what you have.
To really illustrate the power of OSS I will use a friend’s website Misery Loves Co as an example. He wanted to start up an online store that sells urban clothing and knew very little about programming. He has html and CSS experience and a lot of design experience, but that wouldn’t help him write an ecommerce site.
He did his research and found a free open source e-commerce application called Zen Cart. Instead of spending a lot of time and money on buying and configuring a closed source solution, he used the Zen Cart OSS community, a Zen Cart manual and had the site up and running fairly quickly. He was able to spend the time designing the site he wanted instead of messing around trying to create an e-commerce engine or spending a lot of money on something and hoping it worked the way he wanted.
Another site I worked on using Wordpress is the recently launched Pink Tulip Foundation, a site dedicated “to help young girls increase their awareness and knowledge of breast cancer prevention in Ontario”. We needed to build something quickly that allowed editors to create content quickly, so I implemented Wordpress as a CMS.
I have used OSS in the past for my own projects and for work, but I still find there can be resistance and fear of OSS. Even I am not immune from this. I like to understand everything I am using from the ground up, but recently I have been finding the web moving so fast that it’s almost impossible to be an expert at everything. This is where OSS can really save you time. Do your research the same as you would when buying software and make sure you find a well established project. Recently I’ve started using jQuery for some of my JavaScript needs, I use Wordpress for this blog, and I’ve used the Sphider search engine which I had to completely customize. Drupal is also on the list of upcoming OSS to learn. The list of great software out there is almost endless; you just have to find it.
