I found myself paying more attention to the game component than the passing news stories, but diggtris remains a curious Tetris + digg mashup. What about digg these days? My own interest in the site has lessened since they started trying to be the digg of everything, versus focusing primarily on tech. For better or worse, Slashdot has kept its roots.

As for making games out of non-gaming sites like digg, this is an area I’ve been interested in for quite some time. There are a lot of websites out there that could be made stickier by adding some sort of integrated games function. I don’t mean just throwing up an arcade of Flash games, I mean some sort of game that is played while people interact with the site normally. A market exists here for gaming developers.

This morning I checked out a new developer-oriented beta project from Google called Google Gears which boldly promises: “enabling offline apps.”

Google is trying to solve one of the deficiencies with JavaScript by enabling saving of data locally.

Pros
1. Runs on Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.2+, Linux
2. store and serve applications locally
3. store data in a local relational database
4. run asynchronous JavaScript calls locally
5. browser extension is open source. If anything bad is going on it will be spotted by the developer community.
6. Uses SQLite DB syntax. If you are familiar with SQLite use say with PHP, you’ll be able to get up to speed fairly quickly.

Cons
1. Everything must run in the browser. This could be a real deal breaker if you want to have a unique UI for your application. Google Gears should be viewed as a supplement to programs viewed in browsers.
2. Client must download and install the Google Gears browser extension. While it seems not much more than downloading and running a Firefox add-in, it is an exe file. Some users could be leery of downloading an exe. Will they get Google Toolbar? No. Will they get some other Google program they don’t want slowing down their browsing? No.
3. Client must approve execution of local saving to each application. There is a checkbox that is unchecked which will allow the client to allow all applications from the domain that looks like this:

4. for users (like myself) that frequently use multiple machines, I may not want local databases duplicated across each machine. Programs could (and should) offer people like me the option to choose which machine(s) to save local data and which ones not. There doesn’t appear to be any option yet (?) to allow me to access data from another Google Gears database on the network, nor is there any option yet for allowing sharing of resources from multiple domains on the user’s machine via source:

Sometimes web applications on different origins may want to share resources. We are investigating ideas for granting permissions across origins.

Developer links
Google Gears developer area
Google Gears Groups - 241 members as of this writing
First time Google Gears tutorial

Demo applications (these all require Google Gears installed)
Google provides four different demos:

1. database phrases - store user created phrases in a database
2. resource store - shows how to create an remove a ’store’ which is the equivalent of a local file save operation.
3. Managed resource demo - capture a collection of files online and store them together offline in a newly created store
4. Workerpool demo - shows how to run an expensive operation asynchronously

Possible real world uses
The first benefit that comes to mind when thinking about a Google Gears enabled environment are really power Office-like applications in the browser. I’m certain this is the primary motivator to get Google Gears installed everywhere. How long before this is installed as part of the Google Toolbar? I’m guessing not that long.

From a developer point of view being able to store more than you could store in a cookie could be very handy.

For example, let’s say you want to give your website visitors the ability to store searches they make on your website in their own searchable database offline any time. Or maybe you have a fun game you’d like them to be able to play offline and store their high scores. They can play the game and store the results of games in the database and then rejoin their highest score to the online server when they are back online.

How secure is the data? Google’s response:

Google Gears data files are protected with the user’s operating system login credentials. Users with separate login names cannot access each other’s Google Gears data files, as enforced by the operating system … two people using the same OS login could theoretically access each other’s Gears data files, just as they could access any other file on the machine.

Others are saying
I will continue to update this section as I find others saying interesting things about Google Gears today.

USA Today: “The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”
Paul is receiving Google Gears sync errors.
GigaOm points out there is a new version of Google Reader with offline functionality. Another great use of offline functionality. The walls of “you must be connected to play” are breaking down.

Onward
I can see some interesting uses for Google Gears but need some more time to play around with it. Perhaps later today. Any readers built something with Google Gears yet?

Update 7:37am PST: Wow, there is also a Google Mashup Editor:

The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.

Lots of activity late yesterday!

Nice 3D view of Safeco Field, Microsoft.

Today Microsoft released a 3D versions of New York City and other locations while Google released a new street side map view.

Beyond tourists, virtual travelers and developer creations (count on those in the coming days), this won’t be as useful until detailed maps are available in every major city. Would also like to see this not be so US-centric. What about other places in the world? Seems like Microsoft has more cities than Google pimped out but who knows how long that will remain. Whomever gets the most street-level 3D maps of the entire world and makes them available for mashups in other applications first is going to be at least the short term victor.

Google has extensive street side views in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York. Want to walk the Las Vegas strip tonight without getting tired feet or spending a penny, try this:

Google’s implementation is better than what Microsoft’s street side views back in February 2006 and the A9 street view from Amazon. None of this has done much to increase Microsoft’s search penetration over Google, so take the eye candy part of my title literally.

Microsoft’s version also requires downloading an add-on in Firefox (see below) whereas Google’s does not (correction: Google Maps does require newer version of Adobe Flash player).

In the Google street view demo video their street side guy or whatever he’s called has some resemblance to the Channel 9 guy, check it out:

Odd that they wouldn’t use a Google guy type character with different colors. Strange coincidence?

Phillip from Google Blogoscoped points out Google is also releasing something called mapplets, via the mapplets developer documentation:

“Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.”

You can try out some mapplets in the mapplets directory.

Microsoft and Google have had a showdown at the map corral before. Virtual Earth vs. Google Maps was the first time.

I knew about Skype Extras after buying one of the commercial extras (Pamela Systems) but didn’t really expect them to actively promote Skype as a serious gaming platform. Does this make sense?

Wagner James Au seems to think no:

This is a great idea bound to succeed– rather, it would have been, if it had been launched a few years ago. Now, they’re competing in an already crowded market.

Is Skype starting to look like a shoe two sizes too small for a foot? Have they forgotten about what made them popular: good call quality? Or is this a good strategic move?

Being a developer who has created and sold games commercially since 1999 and for fun since the eighties (my how my gaming gray is showing), I’m definitely checking the platform out in more detail before making any serious decisions, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not skeptical of Skype as a successful gaming platform. It makes some sense for them to move this direction but I can’t help hoping they don’t forget their core service.

Should eBay add a games channel? No, they do auctions. Should we be playing the next MMORPG through the PayPal games channel? Umm, no. Skype admittedly makes more sense than these examples but I can’t help thinking this stuff could clog the pipes. The smart turned dumb Skype phone?

Another example elsewhere
Wordpress 2.2 released sans tagging and instead of keeping their widget code an add-on plugin they baked it into the core code. Good for those who used and relied on the widgets but of questionable merit for those who don’t use widgets. Somebody call a plumber or get some Draino ready as the Wordpress core becomes even more constipated. Spin it, Matt.

Skype game dev links
Back to Skype land, have any developer readers scoped out what this Skype GameXN platform offers yet? New paint smell I realize but any early thoughts, concerns, issues, compliments?

The Skype Games Dev Channel is the place to start. The list of existing Skype games includes some party favorites: chess, bingo, a Yahtzee clone called Jazz, checkers and Backgammon (played that yet, Sterling?). Must admit I’ve never played a single Skype game yet, so I need to try that experience on for size before saying any more.

I’m downloading and digging in.

Most people in the tech world know of the impressive resume of Leo Laporte: radio host, podcaster for TWiT (This Week in Tech), author, host of the former TechTV show Call for Help, well respected Mac fan and the list goes on.

Laporte also has the most followers on Twitter, the #1 Twitterer, if you will according to twitterholic. Also rounding out the top 5 is everybody’s favorite Sith Lord: Darth Vader. Takes almost a perfect bowling score of 300 followers to make the top 100 Twitterholic list. I’m not apt to get there any time soon hanging around in Twitter squatter mode, how about you? Twitterholics Anonymous, anyone?

Laporte is worried people will confuse Twitter with his podcast name
Soon will have been the #1 Twitterer past tense as Laporte announced he’s quitting Twitter:

Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT. And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku.

Had heard of and written here before about Dodgeball (twice, in fact). Haven’t heard of Groovr.

Get your poetry book ready for Jaiku
Jaiku sounds like somebody trying to recite bad Haiku after one too many drinks. At least according to Rafe Needleman at CNET, Jaiku has more bells and whistles than Twitter. Needleman also thinks if you hate Twitter, you’ll hate Jaiku too.

I don’t hate Twitter. It seems to have a couple worthwhile uses and I’m sure it will become even more useful if/when more people start using the service for productive purposes. My primary concern for Twitter — and any business that wants to have any longevity– is that the service itself doesn’t have a business model. Recently, Jason Calacanis interviewed Evan Williams on Twitter and at one point there was a confirmation on this lack of a business model. Jason wondered how much all these twitter SMS messages were costing and pinned down Williams on it being “five digits” [a month]. So Twitter is popular and burning through money somewhere between $10,000 - $99,999 per month.

However, lack of a business model didn’t stop Google from buying YouTube another well known money losing site. And neither did owning their own video service (Google Video), so maybe the Twitter crew is being lined up in the Google crosshairs? I’m sure Obvious corp CEO Williams wouldn’t object, as he was part of the crew that sold Pyra Labs Blogger to Google.

Hmm.

Back to Laporte and the whole twit/twitter naming confusion
Tony thinks Laporte is “acting like a petulant child.”

Laporte also cites Twitter-related software causing name conflicts like Steven Hodson’s TwitBox for Windows Vista. Naming software can be a pain and I’m sure Mr. Hodson wasn’t trying to infringe on Twitter by choosing Twitbox. Can’t imagine he ever thought he might be infringing on Laporte’s podcast name either. It’s sort of like the comparison between the Beatles Apple label and Apple computers.

And then there is the word “twit” which 12-12-12.org defines as:

A mild English expletive used by some British children to describe someone who has done something rather silly or stupid.

The define:twit operator leads to three definitions for twit, one of them as Laporte’s podcast name.

Hmm thoughts
My take’s pretty simple: Laporte is being a twit. Twitter isn’t soiling his brand. He’s the one who brought his army of fans to the service and he’s realizing after the fact that because of the name he doesn’t want to “confuse” people? Come on, talk about insulting people’s intelligence, Leo.

This trademark stuff over common names is reaching disturbing levels. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to use the name of anything. Maybe I should trademark Thursawday now? I wonder if by June 4, 2020 I’ll be leaving services because they sound too much like Thursawday.

(j/k on the last sentence)

Seriously, if you want to name software that goes along with the name of a service you almost have to use some variation on the service name so people know the software supports the service. Similar to the sites that evangelized — or leeched off, whatever your perspective — the digg sites.

Though I’ve been uncomfortable doing this with programs, I’ve done this in the past myself. For example, I had a billing processing program that worked with the online billing processor IBill. I called my program Ezibill (program has since been retired). Not only didn’t IBill have a problem, they listed my script site as one of the half dozen or so approved script vendors. That’s the way it should work. I wasn’t trying to damage their trademark, my software only worked with their service. I didn’t go so far as registering a domain for ezibill though, which is good in hindsight since eventually Ibill released their own processing scripts (for free) to their customers.

Meanwhile you have GAIM changing their name to Pidgin over a naming dispute with AOL. Naming disputes are sometimes valid and at least in this case both were instant messaging programs.

Bottom line in this case: Laporte should have chosen a non-common acronym for This Week in Tech podcast if he didn’t want to run into naming conflicts. I can understand his concern if the service was called ThisWeekInTechChat but Twitter? Considering his show targets a tech audience, I wonder how many of his listeners will be offended that he doesn’t think they are smart enough to understand the services aren’t related?

Ironic that both TWiT and Twitter chose a blue color palette (see logos at top of post). Let’s hope color trademarking isn’t next.

I’ve long maintained if an API cannot be used for commercial purposes it’s little more than a toy. Even when it can be used for commercial purposes, it’s important to realize that the parent service can always add any feature you’ve created to their own service. They are in the pole position to usurp your efforts with an upgrade and “new” feature effectively killing or severely maiming your project.

You might be able to mashup something cool, but at a lower level you’re also creating programs for the site/service to replicate down the road if they reach a certain interest level. It doesn’t mean that it’s not fun playing with toys and ego stroking hitting a homerun with a widget, plugin or mashup, but perspective must always be maintained. Serious businesses including small developer shops like mine have to be extremely careful where our time is spent and what third party tools and APIs are utilyzed for projects. We can’t afford to spend too much time developing features for other companies that don’t generate some kind of income directly. No commercial rules for APIs make creating new features for cool services much less desirable.

Like other developers I’m excited to see APIs, but after reading the fine print I’m more often than not disappointed. You know the cliche, the big print giveth, the small print taketh …

Yesterday Google ate some of their young by releasing MyMaps:

we’re announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results.

At the same time they took a swing at their own maps API saying it wasn’t “easy.” In other words, they’re going directly to users and skipping developers. This is the area where Ning with limited success it seems has tried to play ball. I played around with MyMaps this morning and it looks like a complimentary service to the other sharing products they have: Google Spreadsheets and Docs.

It took me all of a few seconds to create a good places to eat in Pierce county map and leave it (default checked) to share with the rest of the world. Just one location on there now, a really good deli (map) at 6th and Trafton in Tacoma. Best subs I’ve ever had at great prices.

I digress.

Tony from Deep Jive Interests responds:

Brilliant, almost in its ruthless execution. Release a public API that encourages mashups. Allow a thousands ideas to bloom. Cherry pick the ones which the “market” has elected in terms of traffic, buzz, and popularity. Then, copy that idea.

This happens outside of mashups and APIs too, so the risk of working on something that another company with a stronger position can “create” is part of the development process. Flock will likely feel great pain from Mozilla’s announcement that they are going to be baking in some attractive social features directly in the Firefox browser via The Coop. Long time readers will note that I was impressed by Flock and believed these social features belonged in the browser. Not many others jumped aboard the Flock train (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch liked Flock too), but now that Mozilla seems to agree that the fit is right, watch opinions change.

Though unrelated, this situation reminds me a bit of what Google did when they quietly backroomed their SOAP API. Google never said the SOAP API was permanent and if you read the fine print of a lot of the APIs out there, there is all sorts of hemming and hawing happening.

This isn’t to say developers shouldn’t use APIs. Of course not. Rather, it’s important not to put too many eggs in the API basket. Build the primary features yourself whenever you can. I feel for the map mashup developers, I’m not trying to make this post be an I told you so. Microsoft has been making moves like Google did — eating their own — for years.

This is one of the main reasons I’ve been and continue to be very cyncial about the whole web pooh point oh scene. It’s not that I don’t think a small few good ideas are coming out of the web 2.0 scene, but ideas where the foundation relies upon another company’s API, especially if it’s a non-commercial API, is a very risky business plan.

If you don’t like seeing the F word in images, then scroll quickly past this post.

Coding Horror is right, there are too many licenses. Of course Jeff is more visceral about it:

I hate software licenses. When I read a software license, what I see is a bunch of officious, mind-numbing lawyerly doublespeak. Blah, blah, blah.. kill me now.

One possible solution? Just use the WTFPL:

Hmm the WTFPL is strikingly similar to just putting code in the public domain. But not nearly as fun.

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Some people believe that local search is a space that Google hasn’t yet conquered. I haven’t found that to be the case in our local area as Google occupies like 98% of my daily searches, including local businesses. There is, however, something to the notion that nobody knows local businesses better than the people in the area.

This is where iBegin Source steps in offering yellow pages for businesses around the United States that anybody can update using a wiki-style concept. iBegin source offers a free download license for non-commercial use. Businesses can license a state for $1,000 or the entire US for $40,000. As of this writing iBegin claims to have 10,820,479 total business listings.

iBegin downloadable data
The data is pipe (|) delimited and includes the following fields for non-commercial (free): ID, Name, Street Address, City, Zip, Fax, Category, Website URL, Hours, Time Added (timestamp), Time Last Updated (timestamp)

Those who purchase the commercial license get the following additional fields: Phone, Geocoding (latitude and longitude) and Major Intersection.

Having the fax but not the business phone number for personal use isn’t very useful but fortunately you can search from the iBegin Source website and find the phone numbers of local businesses.

Don’t see a business you know is there? Registered users can suggest updates to the system either through the website or using the automated trackback system. The only fields required to become a registered user are username, password and email address.

Design and interaction
Some of the pages use inline windows that appear and the background fades like the definition for geocoding shown below:

I’m sure this was done for stylistic reasons as the site design otherwise is bland. I happen to like bland though when it comes to getting to raw data. The site is primarily text-based and I encountered no third party advertising. There is a button to click for online support but nobody was available (it’s a Saturday, not surprised) to talk to about the site/service.

Accuracy of data
Our offline business established in town since 1996 was listed under the corporate name but the fax number was about three years outdated. It showed being added on January 23, 2007, so whatever source used was wrong. The street address number was completely wrong — off by one number — we moved from there a year ago to our present location. I decided to attempt to fix/update the data.

Through the web form I edited the wrong information and corrected and then his submit and was treated to a PHP header error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent [server/file details redacted]

By revisiting the page all my changes took, but a keyword search still would not reveal the business either before the change or after. Compare this to Google and I put in our business name which also had our address a year ago with all other information correct. Both iBegin and Google had the right phone number (which has never changed), so that’s positive. Still, I don’t know why our business wasn’t turning up in the search using the zip code.

I tried a couple other searches for local businesses. Data accuracy overall was on par with other business data services I’ve seen, including the phone book, which isn’t that good. I didn’t fix any other data.

Other features
Some attractive iBegin feature for developers: every listing in hCard microformat and has location saved in KML, the aforementioned geocode data which would be handy for mapping mashups and everything is section 508 accessbility friendly using HiSoftware’s Cynthia Says.

Summary and grade
The problem I see with community updated data sources is what’s to stop competitors, vandals and spammers from altering data? It was easy to change our business information, too easy. And I didn’t even get into using the automated system. How do they know the address I put in was accurate? It’s relying on Wiki style monitoring and updates and my experience with public wikis is they only work if you have enough people monitoring the changes and locking out abuse.

Like any directory service, it’s only as good as the accuracy and reliability of the data. I’m not convinced iBegin Source will do any worse — or any better — than competing services that poll businesses to gather the data (like the phone company and local yellow pages).

Pricing? As a small business owner $1,000 for the entire state seems reasonably priced if you market to the entire state, however our primary marketing area is the greater Puget Sound area, so we’d need a much smaller subset than the entire state.

Unlike the Wikipedia iBegin Source is not a non-profit venture and they may find it difficult to get enough people involved to help maintain the integrity of the database. On the plus side the forms and scripts don’t have the annoying Wiki markup. Overall, not something I’d use for personal or business use, but others might find this useful in their local areas. Grade: C-

In the UNIX world cron is used to schedule events like updating a web page, retrieving RSS feeds, changing a file and countless other activities. Among other updates, cron is used here to update the daily stock graphs at the top of the finance category page.

Yesterday, I noticed these graphs weren’t updating and logged into the shell and entered crontab -l to see if there were any errors in the crontab syntax. None. A sudo ps aux command showed cron was running (pictured above) … and yet it wasn’t firing any of the jobs.

The UNIX forum offers suggestions for making sure cron is running like checking the cron log files, using touch to a file and watching the timestamps in a cron job like this:

* * * * * touch /tmp/.cron_is_working

To see if it’s running it’s as easy as watching the timestamp on the files and seeing the time changes. If you aren’t familiar with the format, those asterisks from left to right and separated by spaces indicate:

minutes, hours (0 = 12am, 23 = 11pm), days, months, weekdays (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday)

EXAMPLE. let’s say you only wanted to touch a file called ‘thursawday.txt’ in the /tmp directory at 12:01 am on Thursawday (4 = Thursawday), the cron code would look like this:

1 0 * * 4 touch /tmp/thursawday.txt

What if you want to touch ‘thursawday.txt’ every five minutes of every hour on Thursawday?

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * 4 touch /tmp/thursawday.txt

If you’d like some help generating cron jobs, a couple years ago I created and shared a cron generator you’re welcome to use. It also includes keyboard hotkeys (edit, save, exit) for using common UNIX shell text editors AE and VI.

John Musser who runs the excellent site Programmable Web maintains a handy list for developers of Application Programming Interfaces (API) grouped by name, date, mashup count and categories like: advertising, answers, blog search, blogging, bookmarks, calendar, chat, community, email, events, fax, financial, internet, mapping, music, widgets and more.

I met John at Search Champs v4 and have been visiting his site since. He’s from the Seattle area too. Keep up the good work, John.