A resurrected blog on the Indie Web
One of my earliest blog posts delved into the challenges of http authentication and forms.
The good news this week that there is a new “radical proposal for integrating HTTP authentication with HTML forms.”
The bad news is that “this idea has been kicked around for more than a decade” and that “no browsers currently support this proposal.”
The optimist in me wants to believe this will happen. The realist is happy to no longer be forced to work exclusively with http authentication.
An note to those attending the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC.
I was struck last night at the TechSet networking event at how much I was out of my normal element. The experience made me realize that nearly no one at this conference knows who I am. So why would anyone come to my session?
With that in mind, I want to give you the top ten reasons to attend my talk about Going Fast on the Mobile Web:
So there you have it. Ten great reasons to attend my session. The session details are:
I also want to assure people that even though it is in the performance and scaling track that it has a wider appeal than just people who specialize in those topics.
I hope to see you tomorrow.
Sometimes you can’t find the words to describe what you’re seeing. Watch this video about Dean Kamen’s latest invention.
Want to the find the first post you wrote or that someone else wrote? It’s easy.
http://twitter.com/[username]?page=[pagenumber]
That’s it. Enjoy!
I’ve been introducing a lot of people to Twitter lately. The conversation when I introduce it to someone has a very familiar pattern:
This reminded me of the way that Scott Kveton talked about Twitter during his intro at Ignite Portland. He said:
By the way, when I tell you about this, you are going to think this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard of–because everyone who Twitters thought it was stupid too.
That’s absolutely true. Many of the most prolific people on Twitter had the same thoughts as people who look at Twitter now and think it won’t work for them. I thought it might be interesting to go back in time and see if they tweeted about their impressions.
This sparked a series of re-tweeting people’s early tweets. Some of my favorites:
@marshallk “now if I can just figure this service out quickly :)“
1st tweet from @jowyang: “Surfing the web” 2nd tweet: “sitting at home“
@kveton “I’m sitting here trying to figure out why I’m using this … haha … :-)“
There are a lot of funny early tweets to look at. But the main reason I wanted to expose this was to say to people who are new that you’re not alone in wondering whether or not Twitter will be worth it to you. The most experienced Twitter users started out with the same questions, wondering if they had anything worthwhile to say, and if anyone would bother to follow them.
So give Twitter a shot and be sure to stick with it for awhile until you find your voice. Sometimes things that are valuable aren’t apparent until you give them a try.
The second post in my mobile series before Wednesday’s presentation is now up at Cloud Four’s blog.
I’m enamored with the lines that are blurring between the desktop and the web. Adobe’s AIR application is a great example of this mixture of desktop code and web code. Now both Safari and Firefox are supporting Simple DB as a way to provide offline access to web applications and then later syncing them back to the web.
Another example of this trend is the creation of application specific browsers. This doesn’t mean you have a browser that will only run one web site. Instead, it means that if you use a web site on a regular basis, it may make sense to have that web site running in a browser that isn’t your primary browser so that it is isolated from your other browsing.
Why would it make sense to have it isolated? Say you’re a web developer who spends a lot of time using Basecamp. You have Basecamp in a tab while you’re working in another tab. If the content of one of the other tabs crashes your browser, you lose your work. In addition, you have to dig through the tabs to find the tab that matters to you.
If Basecamp were in a separate application, you could simply switch to that application and have that application isolated from your other web browsing.
Here are two programs designed to allow you to create web site specific applications quickly:
Both beta applications and neither require you to know anything about creating a web site to use them.
It’s been only three weeks since I got my iPhone. There are many things that I wish it did better, but despite those items, I couldn’t be happier.
The iPhone is a mobile device in the truest sense of the word. It is a joy to use. The iPhone truly lets you see what is possible with an Internet connection that is available to you 24/7 no matter where you are.
I follow the news about the iPhone not simply because I own one, but also because I believe the usage patterns of the iPhone are much more typical of what we are going to see in the future of the mobile web than if we look at the past usage of mobile devices. Trying to draw conclusions about the future of mobile devices by looking at statistics before the iPhone is like trying to draw conclusions about the future of web browsers by looking at the usage of gopher after Mosiac had been released.
Here are some recent updates on the iPhone that are of interest:
(Cross-posted at http://www.cloudfour.com/21/33-billion-mobile-devices-half-the-planet/)
I wrote recently about how the number of mobile devices dwarfs all other media and how this staggering this statistic is. A recent study puts the number of mobile devices at 3.3 billion, up from the previous number of 2.7 billion. That is one mobile device for half of the world’s population.
Tomi T Ahonen provides some context on these new numbers:
Much like Tomi’s previous article, the real perspective comes from his comparison of the number of mobile devices (3.3 billion) to things we take for granted. For example. there are only 1.5 billion people in the world who have credit cards.
Some significant mobile updates over the past few weeks: