WebApps
Yahoo Wants You To Stalk Your Friends - Introducing Fire Eagle
Friday, March 7th, 2008 | API, Beta, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite - By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:
1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.
2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy
3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” - that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.
This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either - they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.
It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this - A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).
With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework - Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).
So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.
This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)
[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]
Microsoft Released Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 For Public Download!
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 | Beta, IE8, Microsoft, Software Update, WebApps | No Comments
Microsoft just released their latest version of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 to the public on their “Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit” site.
On the main page is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect: This release contains some great advances in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout, programming model, performance, reliability, usability and service integration. We are eager to ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 8 is seamless for you and your audience, and to give you a head start on using many of the new features with your sites and services. We encourage you to test your sites and services, and our platform implementation, and give us feedback!”
One of the interesting new features they talk about is something called “Activities:”
These activities/services are supposedly going to be available to developers to tweak enabling 3rd parties to offer mini-web-apps to integrate within the browser. There are a few other “features” they highlight on the site, so go check it out if you have any interest.
For direct download links:
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Window XP SP2
Adobe AIR + Flex Builder 3 Final Released!
Monday, February 25th, 2008 | AIR, Adobe, Flex, Software Update, WebApps | No Comments
Today Adobe announced the release of both the latest version of their AIR project as well as the final release of Flex Builder 3 (A GUI front-end for the now open-source flex platform). This means those beta’s copies that you’ve been using are soon to expire.
Adobe AIR, formerly code-named Apollo, is a project that lets developers use practically any programming language to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) that can be deployed across almost any operating system. It also allows the developer to create an application that can store data offline and easily re-synch later on when re-connected to the database/internet. There are already a handful of applications out there that are build around this project, with my favorite being Pownce. Speaking of which, feel free to stop on by my profile on Pownce here: www.pownce.com/brentter/ and add me as a friend if you’d like. It’s a combination message board, calendar, file exchange server, and image host. To cut down on server load they’ve incorporated Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) to house all their file storage needs.
Another useful implementation of Adobe AIR is a desktop-based app that lets you check on your Google Analytics accounts without ever having to open up a browser. You can sign-up for the beta download on About Nico’s site.
Download Adobe AIR (for free) from the official Adobe AIR page.
Flex Builder 3 Pro clocks in at a whopping $699 with the standard edition coming in slightly cheaper at $249. If you are a student or teacher however, they STILL offer a free copy to those that apply (which I think is one of the best things any software company could have done). The Flex 3 SDK can be found on their official Flex page for a free download if you don’t want to shell out that kind of cash for the complete Builder Application. Apparently there is a big difference between the standard and pro edition too - with the pro version including built-in memory/performance profiling tools, their “Advanced Datagrid,” and comes with its own set of scalable charting components for “rich data visualization.”
Flex Builder 3 was in beta for quite a while, which let users learn how to utilize it’s advanced database manipulation features, most of which can be viewed on the Flex Showcase site.
Today’s announcement was most likely timed to coincide with the big 360|Flex Conference that kicked off today here in Atlanta, GA. It runs from the 25th-27th and features some of the leaders in Flash/Flex development. Day passes are still available if interested.
Something interesting with Flex is it gives you the ability to manipulate whatever you design with other programming languages in ways that were almost un-heard of using flash. My favorite is its integration with Ruby On Rails. RoR can be used as a streamlined back-end solution for your web-app, using Flex as a pretty front-end to display the data. A really great site I’ve come across with helpful examples of Flex/Rails in use is Derek Wischusen’s site - FlexonRails.net. If you want to see an example of both pieces of technology being used in new ways, check out his post where he explains (with source code) how to do a Server push with Ruby on Rails using Flex, JRuby, and BlazeDS. Another interesting one is where he tries to integrate as many new forms of languages/services as possible is his post on integrating Flex, BlazeDS, and a web-app framework for Scala called Lift
Read more about Flex Builder 3 and the Flex SDK on Adobe’s official website - www.adobe.com/products/flex/
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