Toluu : Niall Kennedy's Weblog

Niall Kennedy's Weblog

Tracking how syndication and emerging new businesses are changing life on the Web.

Rewriting Twitter for web best practicesNovember 19

Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development. TwitterFE.com is a fully-functional read-only clone of Twitter.com designed to make your web browser sing. I created the site as an example of web development best practices anyone can integrate into their web presence.

The new web front-end on TwitterFE.com features localized templates, expressive markup, distinct URL structures, integrated site search, geo-distributed dynamic and static servers, and more available features than Twitter.com. In this post I will outline some of the changes I've applied to the Twitter front-end reproduction as they apply to general front-end web development.

Syndication and Widgets PrimerNovember 6

The publishing world is continuously evolving, creating new opportunities for plugged-in companies to reach new audiences like never before. Today's publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven't gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers. This summary document helped shape the Widget Summit program and new publisher opportunities.

Widgets and Syndication presentation capture

A widget in its simplest sense breaks apart a

Yahoo! Open Strategy launchOctober 30

On Tuesday Yahoo! launched its Open Strategy, exposing Yahoo! account data and social connections to third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is the third pillar of faith announced by CEO Jerry Yang last year during the company's rebirth. Y!OS is the new glue connecting the next versions of Yahoo!'s own properties and will eventually power more relevant advertising across the network. In this post I will provide an overview of the new Yahoo! services and its impact on both Yahoo! and third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is one of the keynote presentations at Widget Summit next week.

The Yahoo! Open Strategy first and foremost unites Yahoo!'s own product fiefdoms into a common set of interchangeable components. The new platform ties together social features and rich content units across Yahoo! properties in much the same way as YUI abstracts a common set of JavaScript and CSS interactions across Yahoo!. The company announced plans to integrate the Y!OS platform into a new version of My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail over

Better Design Through CodeOctober 3

Every day our web applications ignore useful visitor data. We respond to single request based on a domain and a path without listening to the capabilities, location, preferences, and favorite interactions of our visitors and their requesting agent. A few weeks ago I challenged a room full of designers at PARC to rethink what's possible on the Web and rely on adaptive programming techniques to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time. I titled the 50-minute talk "Better Design Through Code" and walk through latent capabilities of servers and browsers ready and waiting to deliver personalized, adaptive content to unique Web visitors.

I prefer recorded presentations to static shared slideshows. Each movie has 3GPP timed text chapters indexed by slide if you would like to jump ahead to a particular part of the presentation. The whole process is very experimental yet an interesting way to reach new audiences.

Classify incoming requests

Incoming

Inside the iPhone App Store acceptance processSeptember 16

Apple's iPhone OS App Store is a little over two months old and already the focus of both hype and fear among members of the press. KPCB has already invested more than $30 million through its iPhone-specific fund. Established companies are writing iPhone applications for the first time. A few applications have been banned, as expected with most platforms. Apple's relative secrecy regarding the iPhone platform and distribution policies have caused market uncertainties in need of some further clarity. In this post I will examine the iPhone OS 2.0 platform and the iPhone App Store from the point of view of Apple and other hosted storefront providers.

As I write this post there are over 3400 applications available from the iTunes App Store. 90% of those apps are available for both iPhone and iPod touch. 76% of App Store listings require payment ($1 or more). Developers may distribute an iPhone OS 2.0 application directly to handsets using their own infrastructure or distribute through Apple's App Store built-in to iTunes and iPhone OS.