Google Buzz: First Impressions

I've been hearing a lot about Google Buzz lately and lo and behold, it shows up in Gmail this morning. Initially, I ignored it, but I visit my Gmail account quite often and so figured, "what the heck". As I was going through the set up process (which isn't really involved), I was inspired to open up Google Wave for the first time in more than a month. I saw a few new Waves, but nothing like the flood of unread messages I'd expect if I just ignored Gmail for about six weeks. I've written a couple of blogs on Wave, including an an initial review and an update called Why Hasn't Google Wave Gone Viral? My interest in Wave has waxed and waned and now that Google has thrown Buzz into the mix, was I supposed to get excited?

Frankly, I feel like I must be missing something. I started following a few people on Buzz, particularly Jesse Newhart, and in reading the various discussions he's started, a lot of people seem completely thrilled about Google Buzz. I did some searching, trying to discover the Buzz potential and amazingly, I even found an article published at Business Insider called Is Google Buzz a Facebook Killer?

Frankly, I find it difficult to keep up with Buzz, although I've gotten to the point where I'm on top of twitter. I use TwitterGadget in iGoogle, where I spend much of my time when I'm in front of a PC, so I can keep up on tweets and still do my other work. But I have to visit Gmail to find my new "buzzes", if that's the correct term. Not that I don't open Gmail a great deal as I mentioned, but I don't have it open constantly. If traffic in Buzz is supposed to be as frantic as in twitter, assuming a fairly large number of followers, then you'd have to keep an eye on it more or less all the time.

I found myself thinking of the famous quote from Fellowship of the Ring:

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

Between just how many different interfaces must I bounce in order to satisfy my need to be social?

If Google could put Gmail, Buzz, and Wave in one place or at least make easy and quick connections between them, and then get them to all really talk back and forth to twitter, Facebook, and the like, and then give me one place to aggregate the whole thing, it might serve my needs. Of course, I don't know that's not what Google has in mind for all this; it just seems that with Wave not having "found it's feet" yet, so to speak, launching another big social networking app just for giggles is a tad much.

OK, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater (yes, that's an old cliche but the old curmudgeon in me made me say it) and I did title this article "First Impressions". Not dismissing Buzz completely out of hand, I haven't exactly fallen into "early adopters euphoria" over it either.

To give it a fair test, if you follow me on Buzz, I'll follow you back...unless you're a slutbot (I had to block the first one in Buzz just a few minutes ago) or a spammer.

What do you think?

SourceForge Lifts the Block: The Power of Negative Publicity

I woke up this morning to Joe Brockmeier's blog and the happy news that SourceForge has decided to lift it's block against the various nations the United States has placed on its embargo list. I had blogged on the original ban announcement and was pleased to see further action had been taken. Actually, the entire matter is not quite as clear cut as it may seem.

First, you'll recall the original announcement by SourceForge that it was establishing a denial of site list in order to comply with United States legal requirements, banning nations such as Iran, North Korea, and Syria from being able to access any of the open source projects hosted at SourceForge. Of course, that didn't just ban the governments running various totalitarian regimes in these nations, but also every single citizen living in the banned countries. In essence, the United States, and by its legal compliance SourceForge, was restricting people from access to open source projects just because of where they lived.

I didn't blame SourceForge for this (although plenty of people did). When you get a legal order from an entity that has the right to issue and enforce legal orders, if you are law abiding in your nation of residence, you comply with the order. SourceForge had nothing to gain by "bucking the system" and could ultimately do more harm than good to the open source community by telling the U.S. Government to "go pound sand".

Things have now changed. SourceForge has decided to lift its ban according to their announcement last Sunday but that doesn't mean it's "business as usual". SourceForge has put the responsibility to allow or deny access to projects in the hands of the individual project administrators. This makes a lot more sense when you consider that not all projects universally are banned from being disseminated by the U.S to embargoed nations.

Is full access to all the projects at SourceForge completely restored? No. Access is now determined on a project-by-project basis by the project administrators themselves. SourceForge is only involved to the degree that it has allowed project admins this level of control over project access on the SourceForge site. Most of the comments made in response to this action, at least from U.S. developers, are really positive. Non-U.S. folks tend to still slam the U.S. embargo list if not SourceForge, including one German fellow:

I am not an U.S. citizen, so I give a fuck on U.S. laws. We Germans are allowed to export anything to anywhere. Also our encryption mechanisms. So it’s all right for me.

I guess you can't please everyone.

For instance, Brockmeier's blog included a link to ArabCrunch.com's take on the SourceForge matter (despite the fact that the embargo list doesn't affect just Arab nations). You can read first hand, the thoughts and particularly the emotions this entire incident has evoked, as written by Abdulrahman Idlbi, who "is computer engineering master’s student at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals", in his guest editorial.

Did SourceForge do the right thing? Yes. The overarching principle of open source is to be accessible to everyone, and I mean everyone. Politics, ethnicity, gender, and any other differences and divisions simply don't matter. Open source, at its finest, functions to unite people, or at least developers, all over the world, in a common and peaceful endeavour. OK, the real world doesn't work that way, but as I said, this is an ideal. I think we found out pretty quickly that political and ideological differences kick in with a vengeance (see the comment from the German fellow and the ArabCrunch article) when you throw a monkey wrench into the machine.

Open source is an ideal but this entire sequence of events has illustrated with great clarity that we human beings, all of us, have a long way to go before we even approach this ideal with how we think, feel, and live.

Fourth Annual Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Focuses on Platforms for Growth

This information appeared in my inbox a day or so ago, so I thought I'd pass it along. Feel free to do the same. Cheers.

San Francisco, CA, February 4, 2010 — O'Reilly Media, Inc. and TechWeb, producers of Web 2.0 Expo and Web 2.0 Summit, today announced the return of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, the annual event for designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists building a web for the 21st century. This year, Web 2.0 Expo centers on the theme of "Power of Platforms," helping businesses choose and leverage the right web platforms for success. Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco is May 3 - 6, 2010 at Moscone West.

"It's not just about how companies use the web as a platform," said Sarah Milstein, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair and TechWeb General Manager. "It's about how they fit into an ecosystem or create new, larger ones. What we're interested in this year is the new wave of companies that have the potential to build new economies and exploring exactly how that is done."

Celebrating its fourth year, Web 2.0 Expo continues its tradition of inspiring and educating the tech industry by providing unparalleled educational programs and valuable networking opportunities. This year, the event launches One Day Intensives, "mini-conferences" that feature expert speaker panels in a participatory classroom experience. Web 2.0 Expo Intensives feature "Lean Startup" with Eric Reis of StartupLessonsLearned.com and "Applied Communilytics" with Sean Power and Alistair Croll of WatchingWebsites.com.

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco will consist of a multi-track conference, an "unconference" program called Web2Open, a major tradeshow and many networking opportunities and events. Conference tracks include: Strategy & Business Models, Social Media Marketing, Design & User Experience and Development with six focus tracks on Mobility, Community, Real-time, Analytics, Enterprise and Cloud Computing.

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2010 welcomes supporting companies, including Platinum sponsor Microsoft; Gold sponsors Adobe, Invest in Germany, and IBM; Silver sponsors Berlin Partner, blueKiwi, EffectiveUI, HP, Neustar, OpenSRS, OpenText, The Planet and SOASTA.

To learn more about the 2010 Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco or register visit: www.web2expo.com/sf
For articles, blogs, photos, videos, and speaker presentation files from Web 2.0 Expo SF 2009, see: www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009

To read the O'Reilly Radar, visit: radar.oreilly.com

If you have ideas about areas you'd like to see included at the conference, send a note to: webexpo-idea@oreilly.com

If you'd like to stay up to date on information relating to Web 2.0, sign up for the conference newsletter (login required): elists.oreilly.com/#conferences

About TechWeb
TechWeb, the global leader in business technology media, is an innovative business focused on serving the needs of technology decision-makers and marketers worldwide. TechWeb produces the most respected and consumed media brands in the business technology market. Today, more than 13.3* million business technology professionals actively engage in our communities created around our global face-to-face events Interop, Web 2.0, Black Hat and VoiceCon; online resources such as the TechWeb Network, Light Reading, Intelligent Enterprise, InformationWeek.com, bMighty.com, and The Financial Technology Network; and the market leading, award-winning InformationWeek, TechNet Magazine, MSDN Magazine, Wall Street & Technology magazines. TechWeb also provides end-to-end services ranging from next-generation performance marketing, integrated media, research, and analyst services. TechWeb is a division of United Business Media, a global provider of news distribution and specialist information services with a market capitalization of more than $2.5 billion. *13.3 million business decision-makers: based on # of monthly connections.

About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

O'Reilly conferences bring together forward-thinking business and technology leaders, shaping ideas and influencing industries around the globe. For over 25 years, O'Reilly has facilitated the adoption of new and important technologies by the enterprise, putting emerging technologies on the map.

O'Reilly Conferences.

Book Review: Web Design for Developers

A Programmer's Guide to Design Tools and Techniques
Author: Brian P. Hogan
Format: Paperback, 300 pages
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1st edition (December 15, 2009)
ISBN-10: 1934356131
ISBN-13: 978-1934356135

While there can be some overlap between web designers and web developers, they tend to define their own specific worlds. However, what if a programmer would also like to be better at design? Where does he or she go? Turns out Brian Hogan and the folks at Pragmatic thought in that direction as well and came up with Web Design for Developers. I guess the title gives it away. But is this book just for programmers who want to learn design?

On the surface, the answer to that question seems to be "yes". You've created a killer web app but the appearance of said-killer app looks lousy...or at least doesn't look as good as you'd like it to be. Of course, you probably know someone who could help out with the design, but it might be nice to be able to do the job yourself. How to begin? The blurb on the back cover mentions magic words such as PhotoShop and CSS so I'm guessing that's where you'd start. I still can't imagine that a book like this is only for programmers, though. Let's dig a little deeper.

Well I'll be darned (or something). As I began looking through the book, the target audience seems to be folks who are cracker jack web developers but who really don't have much of a clue about how to actually design a web site. I point you to Chapter 9: Building the Home Page with HTML as proof of this. For people who've mastered the arcane intricacies of ASP, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails, I wouldn't think a simple markup language would be much of a chore, and for some programmers I know, it's not. Actually, for most programmers I know, it's not. On the other hand, while HTML might not be much of a basic challenge to a developer, creating a web site and making it look good could be an uphill climb, as it requires something of an artistic way of viewing the web.

That explains the earlier chapters in this book, which includes basics on style, color, fonts, and graphics. To my relief, Hogan did mention both GIMP and PhotoShop, so his book isn't a slave to proprietary software. That's good, because designing for the web can be done very expertly utilizing the world of open source tools. This also gets at what I was alluding to a few paragraphs ago. Do you have to be a programmer to benefit from this book? No.

What do at least some web developers and any one else who wants to design web sites but have little or not experience with the job have in common? The question provides the answer. There's nothing in the book's presentation of the topics involved that can only be understood by programmers. If a developer can read and understand font and typographic basics, so can the non-developer. The would-be web designer picking up this book will likely get the same information and skills practice as the programmer thumbing through the pages.

I particularly liked the section called Adding Graphics, which contained a number of chapters instructing the reader how to put together a mock-up site, focusing on structure and content. If you don't have experience making an image in your imagination turn into a real web site design, these chapters will help you operationalize your images and your dreams...and this comes before even one word about HTML and CSS.

Another nice feature in the book that I rarely (but not never) see is how to design for web browsers. The author slams Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and rightly so, but also addresses what you have to do to design for IE's tendency to work outside of accepted standards, particularly IE6 (which should just plain be abandoned). From designing for people who are visually impaired to designing for mobile devices, Hogan hits all the areas someone building for the web in 2010 needs to understand.

The mock-up site designed early in the book has a life throughout its pages and acts as an anchor for developing and refining all of the different tools and techniques practiced by the reader. Some content, such as testing and performance optimization (Chapter 20) might be more familiar to programmers than other folks, but, if you've gotten this far in the book, you'll probably be ready to tackle such tasks anyway.

I can't say the book is revolutionary or that I haven't seen its content in other books, but taken all by itself, Web Design for Developers is a good primer for anyone who would like to learn web design from a global perspective. From graphics, to color, to fonts, to HTML/CSS, and onward, Brian Hogan has written a solid little book that should get you off the ground and into web design, whether you're a programmer or not.

Sourceforge Denies Site Access to Comply with US Law

Is open source all that open anymore? That's probably an unfair question. By definition, open source products are available to everyone without discrimination...at least from the open source community's point of view. But what about the U.S. Government's?

I was inspired to write this little missive by reading the Dana Blankenhorn and Paula Rooney blog at ZDNet.com. This morning, I took a look at their article Obama enforces trade embargo against open source. This means, among other things, that people from certain countries visiting Sourceforge will not gain immediate access to the open source projects contained therein, but rather, will receive a "nastygram" in the form of a 403 forbidden message.

Why would President Obama, the "transparent" President, do this? I thought he was reaching out to all the communities of the world, including nuclear weapon building Iran. Turns out there are certain countries the U.S. just doesn't do business with. They include Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and yes, Iran.

You can have a look at the Bureau of Industry and Security U.S. Department of Commerce Entity List and Denied Persons List to discover the details, or just visit Sourceforge's explanation regarding how it is complying with U.S. law by denying access to their site from these countries. In other words, we don't do business with terrorists or other like "entities".

Is Sourceforge happy to comply with the Obama administration and federal restrictions? Heck, no. This flies in the face of everything open source is supposed to stand for. Reader comments at Sourceforge pretty much reflect this attitude. For instance, someone named pyalot commented:

Sourceforge, you suck! You suck so badly, I’ll hereby guarantee you that I’ll not only recommend *anybody* stay the heck away from you scumbags, I’ll actively let everybody know that you’re the scum of the earth. Shame on you! Shame!

Another, more measured response, from dutchuncle states:

SF is between a rock and a hard place on this. Law on many subjects tries to spread the responsibility around to involve more people in enforcement, whether they wanted to be or not. For example, think about how many people in business wind up collecting government taxes. Even though SF is “just” a file cabinet, not a creator, they become the first point of contact in any trail of export-controlled information, and so would be the first ones in line to get in trouble. SF is trying to make the best of bad choices, and I agree with their choice while being unhappy that they had to make it.

Bottom line is that Sourceforge must comply or break the law, but as some of the commenters at Sourceforge have noted, maybe it's a law worth breaking in order to uphold an ideal.

That said, we don't live in ideal world and no body of laws, no matter how just the intent of the lawmakers, is completely perfect or fair. Another thing to consider is whether preventing people from these countries from accessing Sourceforge is punishing the governments who are "evil" or the citizens who likely are not (at least some of them)? A person may live in Iran, North Korea, or Syria, but that doesn't make them automatically bad. Plenty of people around the world don't think much of America, but that doesn't mean every citizen of our country supports our nation's policies. Your country of origin does not automatically dictate your intention or behavior.

Who is the Federal Government punishing in compelling Sourceforge to comply with the law; totalitarian regimes who are working to promote violence and oppression in their nations and around the world, or innocent men and women who, like those of us in freer nations, just want to enjoy the work and benefits of the open source world?