I’m not normally very excited about augmented reality apps. Typical use cases tend to go something like: “So, if I point my iPhone camera at that Starbucks, you’ll tell me that there’s a Starbucks there? Awesome.”
But the work the Photosynth team has been doing since their acquisition by Microsoft is truly mind-blowing. I had to check my watch during this 8-minute TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas to make sure that it was still 2010, not 2100.
Tags: augmented reality web 2.0
There was a dark chapter in the early history of the Internet when, any time you wanted to go to a website, you had to painstakingly type “www.” in front of its domain name. This served a purpose of sorts: It told the server, in no uncertain terms, that you wanted to surf the World Wide Web. Never mind that the http:// prefix already said as much; Internet configuration was a dark and untested art, and it just seemed safest to use subdomains like www and ftp to be clear about which of your servers people were connecting to.
But then, as the millenium came to a close, and non-protocol related subdomains like webmail and blog began to proliferate, the www prefix began to fade away. To be sure, it remained on many sites as a vestigial reminder of the days of dial-up and Netscape Navigator, but most of the web’s denizens had learned that it could be safely forgotten. As hip newcomers like Twitter and foursquare dropped the prefix altogether, the augurs seemed clear: www was going gently into that good night.
Or was it?
Yesterday, someone posted to Hacker News that the domain nasa.gov is broken. You have to put www in front of it, or it won’t work. (Note that many browsers, like Firefox, automatically put www. in front of the domain you enter if it can’t reach it without it. But the most popular browser, Internet Explorer, doesn’t.) I replied that it had to be a temporary glitch—some idiot added a new subdomain to their DNS records and accidentally deleted the root!—but no, someone else pointed out, army.mil and navy.mil suffer from the same issue. It’s like they don’t want recruits who don’t habitually triple-tap ‘w’ before every web address!
Look: www has got to go. It’s a waste of bytes and time, our nation’s two most valuable resources. If you own a domain, here’s how to fix the problem:
www subdomain.www.yourdomain.com/whatever to yourdomain.com/whatever. If you’re using Apache, you just need to add the following to either your configuration or a .htaccess file in the domain’s document root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourdomain\.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com$1 [R=301,L]
That’s it! Now if anyone tries to use www, even in a link to a specific page, they’ll still get to the right place. It’s so easy, even a rocket scientist could do it.
P.S. If you absolutely must keep www, at the very least allow those who omit it get where they’re trying to go. To do this, just modify the instructions above by using these lines in your Apache config instead:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com$1 [R=301,L]
This is what Facebook does, for instance. But just as they dropped their superfluous “The” (remember?), rest assured that there will come a time when Facebook.com will truly stand alone.
Tags: web 2.0
The conventional wisdom says that winning a micro VC competition like Y Combinator or TechStars takes a bold new idea, something no one else is doing (or, at least, not doing well). And that’s usually the case. But if you look closely, many of the projects they’ve funded—in fact, many of the most successful ones—are almost identical in concept to well-established rivals with massive brand recognition and deep pockets. The trick is that those older rivals aren’t just old; they’ve gone stale.
Posterous is a poster child for this category. Their idea: hosted blogs. Their biggest rival: Google’s Blogger, which has been around for more than a decade now—and barely changed in that time. In a way, it can’t: Blogger is one of the most popular websites around. Mess with the formula, and they might get New Coke’d. So Posterous comes in with their hip, clean, fresh design, seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter (and, yes, Blogger), and an emphasis on mobile devices, and they’re attracting users like crazy.
But Posterous didn’t just succeed with the same idea as the doddering, decrepit Blogger. They were also following the popular Tumblr by a meager two years, and the sites are in close competition for new features. But Posterous’ borderline preposterous devotion to simplicity distinguishes them from everyone else in a crowded field. Tumblr seemed fresh when it started, but guess what? It’s not 2007 anymore. If you don’t watch your back, staleness can catch up quick.
Posterous’ pitch is three words: “Dead simple blogging.” I’d cut it down to two: Blogger, fresher.
[Update, 1/19/10: A precisely contrary opinion may be found here. We fundamentally agree that design is extremely important, but disagree over which of the two top-notch sites has the better design. I believe that Tumblr’s popularity is mainly due to first-mover advantage. The truth will out.]
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I’ve been reading a lot about programming languages lately. Many exciting new languages have come out in recent years, and the use of multiple specialized languages within a single project has become much more common, thanks largely to the polyglot JVM and .NET platforms. It’s an exciting time to be a programmer.
Unless, of course, you’re programming user interfaces for the web. Which everyone is.
As Jeff Atwood has said, “Everything that can be programmed in JavaScript will be.” That’s because the browser is the most popular operating system on the planet, and JavaScript is its lingua franca. But no one likes JavaScript. Or, more precisely, no one falls in love with JavaScript the way that people fall in love with Ruby or Python or (my favorite of late) Scala.
I never fully understood why JavaScript was so kludgy and inelegant until I read the (highly recommended) interview collection Coders at Work. Long story short, one guy at Netscape (Brendan Eich) threw the language together in ten days, with the stated goals of creating something semantically Scheme–like but syntactically Java-like. Good god!
So why are we still, 14-odd years later, still using the same language for all of our webapps? Because even if some backwards-incompatible NewScript were introduced, standardized and embraced by Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple tomorrow, most people would take years to update to a browser sufficiently newfangled to run it. Heck, most people don’t even know what a browser is. Thus, new webapps have to be written in a half-baked language to be run through decade-old interpreters.
But there is a solution. And for all I know, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already plotting its execution from their orbital battlestation. (Where did you think those Google Earth pics come from?) What we need is a new language for web browsers (or, better yet, a virtual machine standard that could support multiple languages), along with a compiler that can generate JavaScript for the benefit of old-timers. The project would be insanely difficult, but it’s half-done already. Look at GWT, which lets you write Java that compiles to JavaScript. Now suppose that a browser (say, Chrome 5) could run GWT’s Java bytecode directly, bypassing JavaScript altogether. Chrome 5 users would enjoy a much smoother and potentially richer web experience. Meanwhile, older browsers would still present a perfectly usable webapp. And programmers everywhere would rejoice.
That, I hope, is the future of the web. So please, Google, I urge you: Don’t let my children grow up in a world that runs on JavaScript.