Tech Week In Review 3-4-2010

Facebook Patents News Feeds

The web as a whole is moving towards realtime and information streams or feeds. We see this on Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and even the new Google Buzz. It’s hard to imagine a useful social media tool that doesn’t somehow incorporate a news feed layout to bring you information. This is why Facebook being awarded the patent for news feeds is kind of scary. Lucky for us, the patent is not as general as we originally thought. According to AllFacebook, it doesn’t cover status updates like you might see on Twitter, only “stories about the actions of a user’s friends.” Still, it will be interesting to see what Facebook does with this. Knowing what your friends are up to on a social network has become pretty commonplace.

Topeka, Kansas AKA Google, Kansas

We recently talked about Google’s plan to “build and test super fast broadband networks in the U.S., up to 1 gigabyte per second.” In an effort to be one of the 50,000 locations where this super broadband will be rolled out, the mayor of Kansas has actually signed a proclamation that changes the cities name. It’s only in effect for the month of March as an actual legal name change would have been even more ridiculous. Apparently, this isn’t even the first time Topeka has pulled something like this.

in August 1998, the city has a proclamation to change its name to “ToPikachu” — yes, after the Pokemon character. So this move seems roughly 100 times more sane than that one. (via TC)

Opera 10.50 Faster Than Chrome

Opera 10.50 just launched a couple of days ago. Not only are the browser’s Javascript and Graphics engines faster than Google Chrome, the current speed champion, but it also seems to borrow heavily from Chrome’s slick user interface. It offers a private browsing feature, much like Chrome’s Incognito mode. Out of the box, Opera 10.50 has extensive support for HTML5 and CSS3, which are the up and coming web technologies that Google and others have been trying to push. Even though it may seem like Opera is being a copycat, I think this is exactly the type of browser innovation Google was trying to spark when they released Chrome. It’s not the browser itself that Google is interested in, they just wanted to make sure there was at least one advanced browser out there that could keep up with their plethora of advanced web applications.

Apple Wants to Kill Your Hard Disk

Apple has recently been making some big moves into the cloud and many people are wondering why. They say they’re trying to “close the holes” in web standards, but some think there is something more insidious going on here. It looks like Apple is trying to create a world where individual users are no longer in control of their media, kind of like it was before you could easily download any music or movies you wanted off the Internet. The proliferation of high-speed Internet and large hard disks makes this easy as pie and Apple, along with the entertainment industry, wants to reverse it.

I had a phone talk with John Gruber from Daring Fireball the other day, which I requested, after reading a piece he wrote suggesting that Apple’s closing of the Flash hole in the iPhone/iPad was a way to enforce “web standards.” I said it’s a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesn’t care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and “open” are just fig leaves that cover up what they’re really doing. Instead of opening things up, they’re doing just the opposite. Closing as many holes as they can as quickly as they can. Because they’re doing what the media business wants to but hasn’t been able to do, yet — control and monetize user programming of content. Apple and many (if not all) of the tech companies want to get the control back from the users. Of course they can’t say this, and they won’t. But actions speak louder than words.

Then I read this article in CNET that says Apple wants to cut a deal with the entertainment industry to store all their content on Apple servers. There’s a chilling comment in the middle of the story saying they want to get rid of hard disks. That, my friends, is Hollywood’s dream. The real culprit, the real cause of their economic problems isn’t the Internet, it isn’t the wires that connect computers. It’s the under-$100 terabyte hard drive. With a terabyte you can store hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows. That enables you to do your own programming. (via Scripting News)

Google Wants to Index the Web In Real Time

Currently, the web is indexed by Google via the standard crawling method. Every so often, a Google bot looks at your site and indexes it into the search database. This can take quite a while and is nowhere near real time enough for most information addicts. So, Google is looking to implement a push method for indexing the web. This means that once a publisher makes a change it also notifies Google to add the new information to the search database. This is still in development, but could have very interesting implications for the future of the web.

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be “the next chapter” for Google. (via RWW)

Wordpress.com Activates Real Time on 10.5 Million Blogs

In relation to Google’s research into making search itself real time, Wordpress.com has implemented the same type of functionality using Google’s PubSubHubbub (PuSH) protocol. This means that services that subscribe to updates from your blog will receive almost instantaneous notifications whenever you post something new. Even more interesting is that Wordpress is also releasing the PuSHPress plugin for Wordpress.org users. This means that, even if you host your own Wordpress blog, you can still get the benefit of real time feed updates. There were other plug-ins already available to implement PubSubHubbub, but this new plug-in makes things simpler by providing a built-in hub.