A little while back I was chatting to someone about SEO and the power of outgoing links. In the bad old days your client would ask you to build a web site that had no links leaving the site or put some horrible confirmation page asking you that you are leaving!
Whats interesting here is that by not having any external links you are reducing your interconnections with other sites, and so reducing your ranking in search engines. Not only do most search engines allow you to search for linked pages but each additional connection in either direction will increase the weighting that matching symbols (words) in those documents have the same implied semantics. This is just like a neural network where each additional connection re-enforces the bond further increasing the chance of a pattern match.
So I got some helpful feedback on my last post from John McCrea who is VP of Marketing for Plaxo. So I logged back into Plaxo and had a little hunt around and after about 5-10 minutes found my addresses.
My initial reaction was Doh! what an idiot I was, but then after a few minutes reflection I started to think about user interface design and intuitive learning. When I showcase new functionality to my users, they will often give feedback about how easy a feature is to use or find. Often as developers or familiar users of a system we don’t see that something might not be named or located in the most natural place.
I’ve been an occasional user of Plaxo (just the address book) for the last 3 years, using it to keep a few important addresses up to date. Anyway today was the first time I had used it since they launched Pulse, and guess what all my contacts have gone!
Now that’s not very clever for a social networking site and reminds me what Duncan Cragg would say about Web 2.0 and making sure all you data is public, readable in some open format and ideally distributed over the interweb. If fact this really goes back to why “data bases” were created in the first place: data lives longer than applications: well not in Plaxo’s case.
So the wifi seemed to work pretty well out of the box but I noticed after prolonged use it would just suddenly freeze and the only way to make it come back was to reboot. (You couldn’t even reload the module or restart networking stack).
You can tell if this will be a problem for you by running iwconfig: if you have lots of Invalid misc errors and the signal and noise levels are fixed at -60dBm then you will want to switch from the ipw3945 module to the iwl3945.
We may end up getting RESTful smart contracts for free due to all the goodness in the current design. This could lead (my client).com to an unheard of level of security and possible make it the most high profile public implementation of smart contracts to date. Watch this space
Auto Save Enhancement
We currently auto save on page transition but for JavaScript clients we could do this on any change. Imagine a world were your browser behaves like IntelliJ and you never loose any data you type in.
Decoupling Resource selection from Representation selection in our Urls
This will allow resources (domain objects/documents) to be selected (think SQL WHERE clauses) and presenters re-used by the client editors without specific coding by developers. So a url like “/video/skins/latest” could return all videos tagged with skins or possibly any resource tagged with video and skins. What we are aiming for is totally dynamic / fluid urls with uses we never imagined.
So I thought I would start my first post with what I have been working on for the last couple of months. Naturally I have removed all references to my current client.
What we have built already:
RESTful Web Site and Web Components
So just like REST exposed your web service api/end points on to url and embraced simple message / state transfer we are going a step further and making all our web components (think html widgets) be exposed by an addressable url. Composition of components can then be done done either server side or client side. And is therefore not language specific so one could compose a widget that comprised of other widgets written in ruby, python and C# etc. In fact the widgets don’t even need to be on our server or written by us - think mashups on steroids.