What do you get from Twitter?

.. because I don't get it

Well Lynsheila, Thanks for your question:

"Rob, what do you get from Twitter? l must be a technophobe because l dont get it, l prefer chatting face to face"

A good question

Image via Wikipedia

Well, Twitter is quite a lot and that makes it hard to grasp and hard to explain:

• It's some sort of chat, although mostly public, eventhough you can go private
• It's also a form of a news reader, nowadays I get more news through Twitter than through RSS feeds
• It's blazingly fast when something happens anywhere around the world
• I get updates from friends and see what they are up to
• I get insight into the lifes and thoughts of famous people (sport stars, music stars etc) so they almost appear human
• and so much more

It has to do with information flow in all sorts of ways that you can easily subscribe to and after some time you can abondan them as easy as that.

I hear and listen and also speak out through Twitter. So that is what Twitter is to me.

So, what is Twitter to you?

I dare you, come up with your explanation to Lynsheila and all the others who don't get it, but want to get it.

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More amazing news from Google I/O 2010

.. and some things I want

Yesterday, 21 May 2010, there was more interesting news from the Google I/O conference. Again I wish I had been there, especially since they were given away HTC EVO to each and every conference attendee. Accept to Google employees. Too bad for Matt!

Image by Andy-Beal via Flickr

I should start looking for sponsors for the Google I/O 2011 ...

Maybe the big announcements were to be expected and have been predicted, still I think these again to be great news. Also I am seriously considering getting my hands on these in the near future.

Update to Android

Release 2.2 of Android, codename Froyo, is coming. It has better performance and was demonstrated too a very enthousiastic crowd.

Improvements in various areas have been made.

• The speed has been boosted 2 to 5 times by incorporating a Just In Time (JIT) compiler.
• It has enterprise friendly enhancements, think Microsoft Exchange.
• Extra APIs: Application Data Backup API and a Cloud-to-Device API.
• Tethering and Portable Hotspot, work on your laptop in connection with your mobile phone.
• The browser has been boosted by incorporating the V8 engine. Javascript performance boosted 2 to 3 times.

My contract for my mobile phone is coming up for renewal, but I seriously consider jumping in on the Android train. It seems to be picking up more and more speed.

Google TV

Google TV is about using that little laptop screen to watching movies and your laptop and not on that beautiful great widescreen TV you have mounted on the wall. But also about browsing the web on that TV but with limited interface.

Last year I treated my family and myself on a wonderful Philips Ambi-light flatscreen HD TV. It came with Net TV. A very limited browser on the TV. There are a load of web sites pre loaded and easily chosen, but these are all put there by Philips. The companies behind the sites are paying Philips. I, as the owner of the TV, have no way of putting my own choices up there. I can choose some favorites from the available options, but that's it.

Youtube is there but typing in a search query on the remote is going back to text again and there is no way to hookup a wireless keyboard. All in all this Net TV is just not what it should be. I may have used it ten times in ten months.

Google TV brings the web to your TV, no it makes it part of your TV experience. You watch a football match on a TV channel and can have a Twitter stream in the top right corner or something. Also it promises to make the interaction with the Web much easier. Google TV can be built in into the TV or a separate box.

As my Philips receives software updates every month or so I just hope that the learn from this announcement and improve their Net TV software in my TV. I doubt it will come close to Google TV. But I have no doubts that in teh near future we will see more and more TV sets coming with better and better internet capabilities. May it be Google TV or not.

Eventhough I do try to limit the amount of boxes in my living room the day that a Google TV box comes in could be coming sooner than later.

It's over now for this year

Luckily it's only a two day event and that means not another day of big announcements. But these are only the big announcements and more smaller announcements have been made that may have more or less impact on you depending on your occupation and interests.

Now it's time to get back to work and let the dust settle and see what other competitors will come up with and how much of these things really gonna do what they look like doing.

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Google I/O 2010 is amazing

.. eventhough I am not there

Since yesterday, 19 May 2010, Google I/O is raging. Many great stuff is being published and it is hard, no impossible to keep up. It's already impossible to even try to list all the new things coming soon or are even here today already.

Image via Wikipedia

I'll try to name some of the more interesting things I have picked up so far.

Google Font Directory

Ever wanted to use different fonts on your site than the limited few. Mo more mandatory Times New Roman or Arial or Courier. There were already some services out there (like TypeKit) that gave you the opportunity to use the new Web Fonts, but now Google has weighed in on that and partners with TypeKit and offers a first small set of Open Source fonts to use on your web site projects.

I know I will dive into this in the very near future.

As a matter of fact I already have ;-)

The VP8 codec

HTML5 has the <video> tag. That's nothing new. But most video now being served on is now in the format of H.264, a format that has an uncertain licensing model. A model that reminds of the old Compuserve GIF licensing model. After acquiring ON2 Google now has open sourced the VP8 codec.

Already the major browsers are backing that up and also Adobe promised to release VP8 support within Flash. That should be available to more than a billion users within the next 12 months.

Adobe also showed some of the new HTML5 tools for Dreamweaver. Making it clear to developers that Adobe not only stands for Flash (and Photoshop) but also for more cutting edge web based development. Good for Adobe.

Google Storage for Developers

With Google Storage for Developers the company from Mountain View is taking on cloud services like Amazon S3. Now only for developers from the US and invitation only. But soon it can become huge with the power of the giant behind it. I expect that some great applications will begin to popup in the next year based on Google Storage.

And more is still to come.

The consequences of these three major announcements will become apparent soon enough. Expect some more announcements in the coming days of Google I/O.

It's just too much information for now!

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On jQuery templating

.. isn't it just shifting functionality around?

Eventhough jQuery templating is a pretty interesting concept and I feel tempted to use it, I can not stop thinking that it does not help to simplify my code.

I develop in ASP.NET mainly and do construct all the controls by hand, meaning that I first decide what my HTML will look like and then let the control render exactly that markup.

All right, all right

Arguably, I can do that with jQuery templating equally well. But I will be forced to rebuild the ViewState principle of ASP.NET in order to make changes come back to the server. I must call web services to get the data. Meaning that for each form I must have a specific web service. That is quite a bit of work.

Also I would be doing a lot of coding in JavaScript and in C# and I ike to keep as much functionality as possible in my main development language. Just to avoid confusion.

Concluding

Then again, I may have missed some stuff and maybe things can be done that I do not see yet. It's still early in the jQuery templating model and things are bound to change. I will wait and see what comes up next in this area.
For now, I will stick with my MVC inspired, Mediator based framework.

In reference to: A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia (view on Google Sidewiki)

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