Archive for posts tagged ‘web’
Google apps and Microsoft’s file format
Kevin Day, February 21st, 2008Yet another post about a Google app and Joel on Software… anyways…
I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but Google Spreadsheets always seems to be a little bit faster and snappier each time I use it. Right now I’m working from a coffee shop with spotty internet connection, but it’s working as good as ever.
That made me think about how Google must know absolutely every tiny trick about optimizing Javascript in ways that no other company can even fathom. It seems like a good parallel to how Joel says Microsoft was light-years ahead of most other software companies for knowing how to write the fastest code possible on the hardware of the time.
Maybe in 10 years we’ll see Google release their specifications for how they store and update a spreadsheet and complain about how complex it is. However it’ll be that way because it includes hacks to work around IE6’s bugs.
Wanted: Smarter Gmail filtering
Kevin Day, February 20th, 2008A while ago when I first saw Gmail’s option for “Filter messages like these,” I thought that it would use Bayesian statistics to automatically determine which category an email falls into. I was disappointed that it just starts the filter menu with the “To” field pre-populated.
Joel Spolsky mentioned that his company’s software filters email that way and it works effectively.
It just seems like a lot more Google-like way of organizing things rather than filtering based on To/From addresses.
Great blogging quote
Kevin Day, January 12th, 2008From Jeff Atwood, Thirteen Blog Clichés:
It’s always been deeply disappointing to me that we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can’t get past what happened today.
Idea for a LinkedIn application
Kevin Day, December 11th, 2007Since LinkedIn will be allowing 3rd party applications as part of its involvement with OpenSocial, here’s one application I’d like to see:
A status bar showing how I compare to other people with my current job. Take my experience and education and compare those with everyone else with a job similar to mine. I am a design engineer with a master’s degree and 1.5 years of experience. My estimate is that my lack of experience would put me somewhere around the lower 25th percentile of all design engineers.
In addition to my current status, let me know how far I would move up with an extra year of experience, a certification, or another degree. Also, how would I stack up against Senior Design Engineers?
I think now that I’m out of college, I’m grasping for another metric for which to rate myself against others. Regardless, it would help people better set goals in their professional life.
I’m not sure if the Open Social API would allow access to all those other profiles, or if this would require a lot of messy screen scraping. Alternatively, if someone from LinkedIn gets wind of this idea, maybe they could add it themselves (and pay me for the idea too).
Thoughts on the dead internet
Kevin Day, August 27th, 2007Mark Cuban has an interesting blog post that has gotten a lot of attention about how the internet has stopped evolving. In general, I agree with him. A lot of people have high speed internet, Javascript isn’t as much of a pain to write as it once was, and open source software has improved significantly. The result is that we’re now getting a lot of similar websites that all use these tools.
Although some people seem defensive about the idea that the web is dead, I don’t think it’s a surprise. Some of the biggest innovations on the internet recently have been Ruby on Rails, Gmail, and Google Maps. Each of these, however, have really just been significant improvements over things that already existed. They made the internet more fun to use, but didn’t allow you to do anything new. Mark Cuban is waiting for a big increase in users’ bandwidth so that people can actually do something different, such as stream HDTV to their computers. Based on previous technological advancements, I can see why he would think that HDTV will be the next big change.
The alternative to his predicted future is that something else comes along first. Perhaps the dramatic change will be driven by software instead of hardware. From reading programming.reddit and news.ycombinator, I think people are already thinking bigger that just fancy database-driven websites. For instance, Erlang seems to be slightly less obscure now. Also, O’Reilly’s new book, Programming Collective Intelligence, sold out at Amazon as soon as it was available. If these trends continue, I can envision a software-driven advancement that would make the internet interesting again, but I can only guess what it will be and how long it will take.
