Ideas are free

Ideas are free, so here’s the list of mine (previous ideas here).


I still think that the next big thing is an open social network, so that anyone can write an extension to it. Something like Facebook api, but hosted on a provider side. That’s why I believe in GAE. Open and easily extendable social network is the web3.0 for me.


The new idea is to create a Reddit tracker. When you submit something to reddit/dig you’re probably interested who up/downvoted, when it was seen on the front page. I believe that more detailed statistics can show very interesting results. For example maybe tutorials are on the front page for few hours, and than downvoted rapidly. I think that more community news (like Django stuff) is being upvoted smoother. Aren’t you interested what keywords are more popular? Of course except for erlang or lisp keywords. Or maybe your next top 10 whatever news just have to be popular because of the unique title?


Just another idea is to sell/give away hardware, that will measure current meteo conditions. I’d like to have current temperature and wind screen on my computer. The point is of course to collect the meteo data in a central point and create weather forecasts based on this data. Currently forecasts are based on low number of high quality stations. The idea is to create forecasts based on high number of low quality data. I see the computing challenge in collecting the huge amount of data.


Yet another idea, is to create web testing framework on the web. Maybe just create something like Sahi in your browser. That’ll make easier to create tests for your webapp.

[pl] Bootstrap 8.4 - Tomasz Lis

Oto prezentacja Tomka Lisa z sobotniego Bootstrapa "Od startupu do fakapu, czyli co z tym gronem…". Sorry za jakość, ale to wszystko co ten sprzęt potrafi. Chrząknięcia i szepty należą do Sebastiana.



Update 1
Jesli google video nie działa, to tu jest źródłowy wmv.


Update 2
Ostatnie pięć minut okazało się być czarną planszą. Teraz mam nadzieję już wszystko widać.

How many web browsers do you have on your computer?

(no, it's not my desktop)

Simple question: how many browsers do I have?

I use Opera for reading reddit and browsing, Webkit for gmail and google docs (it's really fast), Firefox for web developing (FireBug rules).
I use virtual machines, so it's not so easy to count :)

• main operating system: opera, firefox, safari, webkit
• secondary os: opera, firefox, safari(comes with itunes), webkit, internet explorer 7
• 1st virtual machine: konqueror, opera, firefox (i'm not counting links, lynx, elinks...)
• 2nd virtual machine: opera, firefox, internet explorer 6

... it's only 15 browsers on one computer. Of course most of them aren't used very often.

How many browsers do you have?

Web applications? Think again.

Some time ago I proved that writing comet applications can be very easy.

Now I think, I can put almost anything online. I created chat, I have working proof of concept of ytalk-like web application. I'm thinking about putting Python interpreter online. These are rather standard web applications, someone did it before. What's the next step of "evolution" after comet?

Ideas are free, so I can speak about it, right?

The simplest way of getting new ideas for web startups is to select tool you're working with, and put it online (for example Gmail, Writely, Del.icio.us).

But wait, using comet I can do more than that. I can turn browser to a frontend to any application. Maybe create universal layer for visualization applications. They tried to create it: GWT, XUL. But we don't have to create new visualization layer, we can use existing one and put in on the web.

I believe it's possible to create X11 server online. You will run applications on the remote machine, connect them to X11 tcp port on the server, and view it with the browser. Imagine X11 desktop in your browser. Tabs could be virtual desktops, in one tab you could have multiple application windows. You could even stream bitmaps by emulating overlay mode using flash streaming.

That would be fun.

Advantages of creating web based X server:

• compatible with standard motif/kde/x11 applications
• you have desktop application? I can easily put it on the web
• that would be "the ultimate web application" :P
• if it works, this could be a new "standard" of writing web apps

Disadvantages:

• forget about Beryl/Aero (on the other hand we have OpenGL in flash)
• not so easy to implement, we need to create full implementation of X11 server
• could use quite a lot of resources (cpu+ram), what about scalability?
• cross browser compatibility is hard
• 99% of users on the web doesn't know what X11 is - not compatible with Windows
• latency is an issue, forget about "online gaming" this way

What's the next step of "evolution" after this?

Website loading time debugging (what happens on the wire when you browse?)

One of my responsibilities is optimizing page loading time. There are some very useful tools on the web that help understand where are bottlenecks.

• Pigdom Full page test
• www.websiteoptimization.com

Firefox addons like Firebug with Yslow and Tamperdata are the most important and easy to use tools for every web developer.

On the other hand I see a lack of a tool that is more related to networking. It's fine that yslow can suggest me that caching headers are broken, but how can I test if a content is really cached.

I would like to see a tool that looks more or less like Firebug networking tab, but shows what is really going on on the wire. I would like to know all "If-not-modified" requests or if "Etags" are used. There is also tcp/ip layer that is sometimes forgotten. Are "Keep-alives" used, is establishing tcp/ip connection fast?

That's why I'm thinking of a new tool, nothing revolutionary, just useful tool for me. I'm currently writing the proof of concept. Sample screenshot from my work:

Die Google! - future search engines

While talking with a friend, I realized that Google isn't the last word in the web search engines.

From technical point of view google search engine isn't magic, the topic of indexing data is nothing revolutionary.

The only interesting thing about Google success is their method of promoting good results and punishing bad in search results. In Google nomenclature it's called the (mistified) Pagerank. They keep the exact algorithm in secret, but in the beginning it was some kind of counting links to specified website.


The development of Sergey and Larry's algorithm was tied by their input data. The only thing they had was the source of web page and links between sites. Nothing more. (maybe the domain name, link url and hosting center, but
that doesn't say anything about the content)

Currently, in the time of user generated content, we have a bit more information.

We have direct link between the content and the author. In the Web 2.0 epoch we exactly know who/where/when wrote specified text.

If you search for some information and you found someone's information useful, maybe you would like to seek for more posts of this person. Maybe you would like to see what threads does this person read. Or if you read some forum, it could be interesting for you that most of the people interested in this forum like some different forum. (This is already implemented in online shops. You can see that people who bought this item also bought something else.) Or if your search for information maybe you would like to see content created by your friends first?

I want to emphasize the fact, that exact information about the author of the content is something that Google will never be able to get.

Maybe the idea is to change the meaning of search. Maybe nowadays the thing of 'search' is to link the user not with the content, but the user with the author?

I'm already using this.
When I find something interesting, I want to see other things from the author. I want to know what he is interested in, I search for his profile in LinkedIn, I search for his interesting links in del.icio.us.

How about you?

My theory about the future of the web

The shape of today's network is rapidily changing. First there was dot-com bubble, now we have Web 2.0 and „user generated content" era. It's time to wonder what's going to be next.

I'm not the first one to mention that, but I think that in the nearest future we'd see User Generated Portal. I can imagine users that are programming features they need in portal, and share this code with others. Firefox plugins seem to be an example of such idea but on client's side. No one has yet created technical possibilities to dynamically create web portal and include custom applications in it.

Facebook API is the first sign of new era. But their implementation is very simple. Sorry, but including 3rd party content in an Iframe is just a raw hack, not a solution to the problem. They also don't provide any kind of hosting, to run application you have to run your own datacenter. If you could upload applications directly to portal it would result in a trivial deployment cycle (from the programmer's point of view).

Nowadays programmer work time is very expensive. Everything suggests that this price isn't going to fall, even with the crowd of cheap chineese/Indian developers. The demand for software is growing.

Try to imagine web portal with all possible features anyone could ever need. The only problem would be to learn how to use them. That is the job for the portal owner. He should carefully choose enabled applications by default for each target group.

Today building new features is limited primairly by developers, it can be changed.

Web 2.0

Czym właściwie jest web 2.0? Spotkałem się z kilkoma definicjami.

• Web 2.0 to serwisy społecznościowe, gdzie każdy użytkownik może wpływać na prezentowaną treść. Taka definicja jest chyba najbardziej popularna.
  
• Podejście techniczne, gdzie aby utrzymać serwery portali społecznościowych potrzebne są zupełnie nowe rozwiązania dotyczące skalowania serwerowni. Web 2.0 w tym kontekście to nie ludzie i treść, lecz waty, procesory i nacisk na skalowalność.
  
• Oddzielenie formy od treści i dowolne łączenie treści. Głównym przykładem może być serwowanie danych jako xml + xslt.