Life is grand

Watching Tom Coates introduce FireEagle at eTech. One of his key points is that past and current web-apps tend to be monolithic. If a web-app wants a location feature then it is built into the web-app. The coupling is very tight and even if the location feature is made public it’s interface is often very specific to the web-app that spawned it. Tom says this isn’t the smart way to do things, that, paraphrasing, “deciding what not to build is important.” So along comes FireEagle to provide the location features you need for your web-app. You and other web-apps interface with it in a consistent manner.

All well and good. But shouldn’t FireEagle be distributed? Not just distributed amongst Yahoo! servers but distributed amongst companies and individuals around the world. Let anyone run their own FireEagle instance. That way when Yahoo! gets bought by Microsoft and Microsoft kill the FireEagle project at Yahoo! your app which uses FireEagle isn’t left in the dark. You just switch your FireEagle URL to another provider. Or there is a round-robin list of FireEagle providers that your app. automatically cycles through.

To retain competitiveness though I’m not saying FireEagle goes open-source. It just needs to say “here is the FireEagle interface specification, go forth and multiply.” Yahoo! can then run the best, most scaleable, most efficient FireEagle instance and retain a competitive edge. Another factor of this competitive edge would be Yahoos! internal data-set of locations and how “Waterford, Ireland” can be mapped to latitude and longtitude or “Waterford, co. Waterford, Ireland, Europe, Earth, Sol.” Yahoo! would be able to offer a more accurate/fine-grained service than, say, I would if I ran FireEagle.

This causes some problems for the idea of FireEagle but Quality Of Service is a well understood problem in other industries.

So how about it, FireEagle, may I run my own instance? (I haven’t read the TOC of FireEagle yet…)

Short talk by Matt Webb were he mentions a story about the space spiders in the rings of Saturn who are attempting to return the solar system to the accretion disc days. They form links between the tiny parts of the accretion disc, spinning harps and connections that form a web across the rings and across the solar system.

The analogy is that of the web and what we are seeing now with the formation of planets such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and so on. How big and bland they are compared to the multitudinal beauty of what is in the rings and accretion disc of the web.

For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn’t stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.

Now I know chefs have their secrets but they do give away a lot. And it seems to have helped 37signals. They have given away Ruby on Rails and that act has arguably helped them as much as their applications. If they were just a provider of “simple, affordable software” they would not be half as well known.

Read other tips from Jasonat SXSW.

Apple have every right to run Apple the way it wants to but just for a second could you step back and imagine this; Steve Balmer of Microsoft stands up in front of a roomful of developers and, with a big smile on his face, says “You get 70% of the sale of your software! Isn’t that great!”

If the App Store was just one way of many of distributing apps to the iPhone/iTouch then I wouldn’t have a gripe. I’d have choice and if I chose to distribute through the App Store then the 30% would be seen as a fee for the hosting, payment processing and promotion of my app. If I had a choice I may want to do all of that myself though. Host my app on my website and handle payment with my processing system.

But we don’t have choice. It is either the Apple App Store or nothing.

This isn’t how the web works or how technology should be moving forward. I thought walled gardens were being torn down, they fought the internet and lost. Now the best piece of hardware I own, the iPhone, is going to be hooked up to a walled garden.

(I think the SDK and API look fantastic. Far more than I was hoping for. Well done to Apple on that.)

My first request around the new Google Contacts Data API is for Plaxo to work with it.

I already have nice syncing from my iPhone to my Mac to Plaxo but to get from Plaxo or my Mac into GMail and back is a cumbersome, CSV type affair.

CreativeCamp this coming Saturday is looking very good indeed.

However I have a serious problem. Ireland play Wales in the Six Nations at 13:15 on the same day. To be blunt; I wouldn’t miss the game even if Steve Jobs was giving a talk at CreativeCamp. I am a South African, Rugby is in my blood, mixing it up with my techno geekiness.

So where, in which pub, in Kilkenny can I watch the game on Saturday? Preferably close to Kilkenny Castle where CreativeCamp is being held. Any tips appreciated and any other CreativeCamp attendees are welcome to tag along and shout for Wales.. I mean Ireland, sorry. Go Ireland!

GROW is a fascinating combination of small solar panels and wind powered generators. As each small solar panel converts light to electricity it also moves in the breeze and generates that motion to electricity.

GROW models it after ivy leaves on a wall. My first thought though was why not as a tree? Have a tree like structure standing in your garden with hundreds of branches each covered in these GROW panels. Along the lines of the cell-phone towers that are disguised as trees.

Interesting project all the same.