Posts

I realized today that I’ve used Groove and most people haven’t, so it’s worth talking about what makes Groove cool and why the technology might have interested Microsoft. First of all, it’s worth explaining exactly what Groove is – a platform upon which you can deploy applications. When you start the Groove application, it loads up all of the workspaces that you’ve subscribed to, and each of those workspaces contains one or more applications. You can join a workspace when someone who participates in it invites you. At that point, you download the workspace from the person who invited you (or maybe all of the members who are online). The applications all run in the Groove environment. Groove provides its own toolkit to write these applications, and they’re not Windows applications or Web applications, they’re distinctly Groove applications. They have discussion boards, project management applications, calendars, file libraries, and bunches of other things. There’s also a messaging component built in that’s sort of like instant messaging. Groove’s magic is that it handles keeping the data in sync among all the members of the workspace without relying on any kind of centralized server. When I add a new file to the file library, everyone else who’s online gets it not long after. When I log on after turning off my computer overnight, Groove automatically connects to the other people who are online and synchronizes my workspace with theirs. Again, the impressive thing here is that this is all handled among peers – no server is involved. It’s also secure, all of the traffic is encrypted. So I can’t help but imagine what it would be like if the magical layer were a Windows service, and you could access it using a component of the .NET framework. Then you could write Windows applications in the way that Windows developers already do, and you could perhaps simply give them the capability of participating in these secure, peer to peer networks. I think there’s a place for this outside the realm of Microsoft’s existing collaboration offerings. It’s functionality that’s completely unique to Groove, and is the only thing that will do for some applications. ...

It’s a Fox News world, and we all just live in it. Fox News is planning on hiking the fees they charge cable affiliates because they’re so popular that they can afford to do so. In the meantime, yet another study shows that they offer the least objective coverage of any network.

Steve Levy has written an article about the fact that the blogosphere (I hate that term) is dominated by white males. I don’t have a solution to propose, but I do find it interesting is that this debate is as old as weblogs themselves. Way back in olden times (early 1999), in the pre-Blogger era, Cameron Barrett (I think) proposed that some of the people who were blogging at the time work together to come up with some interesting weblog-oriented project. Anyway, a mailing list was started, and before long, we invited Peter Merholz to join us. His first question was, why are there no women on this list? There were some female webloggers at the time, and we did invite some of them to join us at that point. We never did come up with a project to work on. Anyway, my point is that despite the fact that everyone involved in this project was liberal and open minded, we still didn’t think to invite any women, or even notice that a lack of female participation was a problem. I wish I knew why that was. ...

The Wall Street Journal Web site has published a debate between economics-blogging all stars Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution, and Max Sawicky, of MaxSpeak. The subject is how the federal tax system should change, but the debate is really about what role the federal government should play in society. Interesting and challenging, no matter where you ultimately come down.

Microsoft is coming out with six new typefaces in 2006. The last time Microsoft rolled out some fonts to improve readability on screen, they changed the world forever. It’s hard to imagine the Web these days without Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, and even Comic Sans. I have no idea whether these fonts will be just as successful, but I’m getting tired of the commonly used fonts today, so hopefully they’ll spice things up a bit. ...

AOL has updated its terms of service. I know this because I got an email from one of AOL’s spokesmen. That’s pretty impressive. (I have not yet read the updated TOS, but I suspect that they make it clear that AOL does not claim to own messages exchanged via AIM.)

If you think email spam is bad, wait until voice over IP spam takes off.

Having used Gmail for months, the one feature it has that I wish were present in other email applications is the ability to seamlessly mesh all of the email in a conversation, including the email that the user sends. In other words, if I reply to someone, that reply is stored and displayed along with the message that I sent, making it easy to follow the flow of the conversation. I’m glad to see I’m not the only Thunderbird user interested in this feature, as indicated by Bugzilla cases containing the word conversation. I’m not sure any of the open cases accurately describe what makes the Gmail representation of email conversations nice, though. ...

Not to pick on Russell Beattie, but in a piece decrying interface problems with mobile phones, he illustrates why user interface design is so difficult. Beattie never argues that phones have too many features, but he does say that they have way too many buttons, and even includes a picture of a bunch of keypads to show what he’s talking about. Then he says: The regular user wants One Button To Do One Thing. So the answer is, in all likelihood, that what users really want is fewer features. I got a new phone a year and a half ago – it has a color display, and you can use it to surf the web, read your email, or play games. I shamefully admit that I have never installed any software on it. I haven’t even figured out how to install software on it. Every once in awhile I use it to send a text message or take a picture, and I’ve checked sports scores with it, but beyond that it’s just a phone to me. I haven’t even figured out how to add new ringtones to it. ...

First there was phishing, now there’s pharming, which is an effective complement to phishing and involves spoofing the domain name system. (So that your computer thinks that citibank.com, for example, points to a different IP address than the real citibank.com.)