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Thanks Pedro, for inviting me.

Ignore this.

1. THE Icon

   It's been announced that no other than the original creator for the beloved Firefox icon, Jon Hicks, has been working on a new one! I love his work so much, that I can only expect great things for this new version.

   
   

   UPDATE: Ops! According to this thread on Google Group mozilla.dev.apps.firefox, they dropped the logo for this release! As if postponing revealing µformats wasn't enough droppin'... :(

   
   

2. Extensions Add-ons

   With both a Microformats API, created by none other than Michael Kaply–from Operator's fame–and also SQLite available to extension developers, I'm hoping this version takes Firefox extensions and Microformats to the next level. If you're developing a toolbar for your service, it will be a piece of cake to grab µformats data from webpages and import them directly to your service. After writing a user-script for Operator, I'm certainly curious. If you're into Add-on developing, here's a tutorial on developing Add-ons for Firefox 3 using the Microformats API.

3. Anti-aliased border-radius and other CSS goodness

   You'll still have to use the Mozilla-specific property -moz-border-radius but at least the result will be far better looking than previous versions (2.x). Check the screenshot.

   
   
   And believe me, it makes a difference!

   
   You can check the rest of the CSS improvements by going through the list, but I, for one, am specially salivating for RGBA and inline-block. Too bad we-know-whom will take forever to catch-up.

4. Offline stuff

   Events and storage! What more can I say? I'm definitely going to check it out. With IE8 pointing towards the same, offline webapps will become hotter and hotter.

5. Reviving mailto links

   The ability to choose Web applications to handle special protocols, is going to greatly improve the experience of using webapps as a whole. Composing new mail messages by simply clicking on mailto: links, adding events to online calendars or contacts to online address books. It was a missing piece of the puzzle of online productivity tools. Me like-y.

Everything else...

It's not like the rest doesn't matter... The address bar, the phishing explicit warnings, the download manager, the add-on downloader straight from the browser chrome, quick bookmarking, native theme for MacOS, Vista and Linux... All awesome stuff! But if I had to pick out 5 items, those would be them.

I'm ready. Ship it!
Oh! And have yourself a merry Download Day!

If you want more, make sure you read the Field Guide!

After a shy tweet amidst today's ruckus by whoever is behind microformats.org account at twitter, I had to put this up here.

Yahoo! had talked the talk but they also walked the walk! You can now search pages with microformatted content! Just include the too long keyword: searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.uf.<format> in your search.
(read the blog post on YDN)

Not only that, there's already plenty results in the wild! Have a look at these numbers:

1. hCard — 1,150,000,000 pages (!!!!!)
2. hCalendar — 84,700,000 pages
3. hReview — 43,300,000 pages
4. hAtom — 304,000,000 pages
5. xfn — 261,000,000 pages

Remember. These numbers represent number of pages with at least one occurrence of the chosen microformat. So, in reality, there's a lot more individual fragments of µfs out there!

Harness the power of semantic content

You can now search the hell out of these contents! Here's a few examples:

• Search yourself (in this case, me).
• Events in Lisbon
• Web Conferences in 2008
• Pearl Jam reviews
• You try it...

Yesterday was RSS Awareness Day and I forget to mention it here. Apparently we're supposed to give a push forward to RSS, make even more people aware of this centre piece of the Web as it stands today. So here goes my share, even if belated by one day.

The Video

If you don't know what RSS is, you probably haven't watched this yet. Please, do so now.

↑ Commoncraft: RSS in Plain English

More?

If you didn't get it, don't feel bad. Watch it again or if you don't understand english very well, back in the day (august 2005) I wrote a little piece about them in Portuguese. Introdução às Feeds.

Also, over at the Mobifeeds blog, I wrote Publishers who don’t understand the medium they’re in. Go have a look, if you're publishing feeds somewhere.

RSS, Atom or RDF?

Technically speaking, why do we refer to all feeds as RSS? There are other formats like Atom and RDF that, albeit offering more features in terms of describing pieces of information, are more complex. They are still used, but over time, RSS became synonym for "feeds". Thus, the KISS theory proves itself yet again. RSS established itself by its simplicity.

As a send-off, I'd like to share a recent quote that stroke home. Specially, given the slow pace of this blog.

I don't get why people unsubscribe from feeds that aren't updated often... that's when you SHOULD be subscribing so you don't miss the gems.

– Simon Willison on twitter

I'm glad some of you are still around, thanks to this beautiful piece of the puzzle.

Happy RSS Awareness Day, everyone. Belatedly.

In CSS3 Selectors Working Draft

Editors

Daniel Glazman (Invited Expert)

Tantek Çelik (Invited Expert)

Ian Hickson (Google)

Peter Linss (former editor, Netscape/AOL)

John Williams (former editor, Quark, Inc.)

I've been meaning to write this post ever since Alcides wrote his post: Sorry Tumbleloggers. There, he wrote about the tumblelogs, which Wikipedia says is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.

From where I'm standing there's a fine line between tumblelogs and lifestreams. Lifestreams are aimed at aggregating all content one generates throughout the web... while tumblelogs are aimed at gathering interesting stuff we find around the web.

My point is... since the dawn of time blogging that people have been spitting posts left and right and patterns are easily identified. Let's give it a shot...

• Link or Quick posts - those posts which are basically a list of interesting links.
• Listening to... - It was/is very common to find posts in which the blogger states what he/she was listening to while writing the post.
• Video posts - recommending one or more videos
• Pic Posts - showing off some impressive photo
• Quick updates (microblogging) - those one liners cursing at the skies for some odd reason a.k.a. ranting
• and so on...

The funny thing is... nowadays we can find one or more services on the web that provide a much more specific context - not to mention extra functionality on their own websites - than a generic blog post. Let's have a look...

• Link posts - del.icio.us (or my favorite, Ma.gnolia)
• Listening to... - last.fm
• Video Posts - Youtube's Favorite Videos example
• Pic Posts - Flickr
• Quick Updates (microblogging) - twitter/jaiku/pownce

As you can see, we are past the point were we must confine ourselves to a generic format, a blog post.

Put your content where it best fits!

Subscribing

Of course people don't want to subscribe to 10x different feeds just to know what you're up to. So, instead, setup a lifestream so that people who want to follow you everywhere, can.

One thing to bear in mind is, feeds have different paces. You don't want each song you listen to be published as one RSS item. That's what God invented daily digests for. Feeds with such high paced content, like last.fm and maybe ma.gnolia/del.icio.us should be bundled up so that the reader isn't overwhelmed with more than he/she can handle.

I, for one, wish I could follow some of you via a lifestream. Instead of watching 4 feeds for my pal Billy aka Pedro Eugénio (blog in Portuguese, blog in English, twitter, ma.noglia, etc.), it would be cool to have only one entry on my feed reader for him. From the top of my head, I can think of a dozen other people I'd be interested in subscribing to their lifestream. Of course others, like the great Zeldman, I'm fine having only his blog aggregated.

So, Alcides, it's ok for people to find other places to generate content (including tumblr), as long as that doesn't involve me having to add yet another feed to my reader.

Why don't you get a lifestream?

You think people don't care? You could be surprised. I'm very picky with my platforms, which explains why I've written two blogging platforms instead of using Wordpress. Thus, it won't come as a surprise that I've written a simple PHP5 platform to grab your content and show it like this (you can see it live at andr3.net/stream).

I have plans to distribute this openly, but it still lacks a touch here and there. If you're willing to try it out, beta test it if you will, contact me (sorry, no contact form for andr3.net yet). Requires PHP5 and MySQL 4.x.

If you don't want to run it on your own server, try lifestrea.ms. (You need an invite code first.)

So that is what he's been up to! (makes sense)

Give the demos a try.

This is yet another great push forward to microformats (xfn) and the FOAF project.

The buzz, the hype

Last summer, there was a huge buzz online about this weird, eerie trailer that had preceded the Transformers movie. The trailer surfaced online a bit later and everywhere around the web you could see people speculating about it. That's where this whole hype started. And rightly so... what's better than to have every thrill-seeking movie-goer biting their nails off for six long months?

The juice

I'll only scratch the surface to avoid spoilers, but I'd like you all to know that the best thing about Cloverfield is not what it does... it's what it doesn't do. That would be explaining. Just like you wouldn't know much if you were caught in the middle of all that, the screenplay isn't guided so that the viewer understands what is happening, where the threat came from and what exactly are the military trying to do to protect us. None of the usual clichés of disaster movies.

You're not watching a movie, you're experiencing the disaster with them. specially if the theatre has loud speakers and make the room rattle a bit.

Oh! Speaking of that... I don't believe this movie would be half of what it is if it weren't for the sound. It was astonishingly good. <tiny spoilers!> The monster muffled stumps when they're in the subway, the military sending a rain of rockets towards the monster, helicopters flying over their heads, a tank being squashed like a bug... I could go on. Seriously. </tiny spoilers!> It all made a lot of sense when I noticed during the closing credits that the sound effects were done by Skywalker Sound, a LucasFilms company. That explained a lot.

I have to say, before watching this, I thought it would be Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project. Now, I know, it's Children of Men (character pov) meets Godzilla (monster) meets 9/11 (mass hysteria).

<tiny spoiler!> Also, to conclude, it was remarkable how they found a way of telling a love story without much whining. By letting us know that the documentary was being taped over some kind of romantic memories, throughout the movie they throw us quick glimpses at their previous lives. Remarkable touch, I tell you, remarkable. </tiny spoiler!>

My final advice is, if you can handle great suspense, sudden rushes of adrenaline and loud bangs, you're in for a treat. Not only is it scary, it's clever too. You might want to stick around for the closing credits. It features an amazing overture performed by the Bratislava Orchestra, which compensates for the required lack of musical score. And if you can, stick around to the very very end. ;)

As soon as I started reading Aaron Gustafson's article on ALA #251 Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility and IE8 I knew this wasn't just another "best practice article". This was going to throw the entire web-constructing community into an uproar.

Ever since I got into the web standards groove, circa 2003, I remember finding experts blogs (for example simplebits, mezzoblue, meyerweb, etc.) great places to find insightful comments on best practices and real world code, embedded on their own sites. A List Apart, a magazine, has always been a the beacon of excellency throughout the years. That was why today's issue has created - and will continue to create - such an echo!

Aaron announces a feature that will be a part of IE8 called version targeting that basically allows developers to "freeze" their websites in a given version of a given browser - they expect to have other vendors implement this. This was driven by the fact that many websites "broke" when IE7 saw the light of day. Not because IE7 was worse, but because websites were custom-made for IE6, which included several bugs. When these were corrected in IE7, websites broke.

Now, Microsoft doesn't want the same to happen again with IE8, so their "vision" is to give the option to the developer to choose which render engine his/her website should be rendered with. By spitting an HTTP header (or meta tag) with X-UA-Compatible: IE=7, IE8 will load the IE7 engine and ignore the improvements made in the newest version of their browser. At least this way, websites won't break.

Despite some criticism, it's basically the reverse of the hated browser-sniffing of the late 90s. It's actually forcing the browser to adapt to the code in the page and not the other way around. Despite all this, I honestly think that's not the answer. Freezing browser engines in time cannot be the answer.

For the sake of keeping my sanity, I won't even touch the subject of IE8 behaving like IE7 if you don't opt-in using the HTTP header or the meta tag, I'll let you follow that link and read what Jeremy had to say about that. Please, do.

I just think we could use what we have instead of creating more mechanisms that will generate more entropy. We already have Conditional Comments and to be honest, out in the field, at work, I've frequently felt we could use the same mechanism for other browsers (Firefox, Opera...). Why not use that for fixing the "broken" websites by newer versions? Use a stylesheet specific for IE8 and fix your mess! Pronto.

I just can't get behind this concept. But I'm open to discussion, if you think you can persuade me, please do so in the comments. Even if Eric Meyer comes out in Aaron's defense, I see this as a huge blow to the web standards effort. It's like saying ok, we lost the war, let's just find a way of saving everyone some time and be done with it. It's making each render engine their own little standard and allowing lazy developers to get away with it. Is this the web we want for our children??

Also, I can't see a future where every browser out there has to carry their old render engines on their backs.

Can you?

Further Reading

If you want to know more, read this:

• Microsoft's Version Targeting Proposal @ Webstandards.org
• IE Lock-in @ Annevankesteren.nl
• Compatibility and IE8 @ IEBlog

In order to maintain the current ship schedule for Firefox 3, we won't be exposing microformatted content in
the user interface.

—Alex Faaborg

*gasp*

He went on to say, though, that Firefox 3 will have a Microformats API implemented by Michael Kaply, who brought us the beloved Operator extension. For more on the mentioned API, you can take a peek at the Draft document.

<rant>Lots of people were/are expecting Firefox 3 to be the release where Microformats made the jump to an even bigger audience, so I'll try to be fair here; This sucks. Bad. I know it's not the end of the world, as there will be further releases and Alex said they wouldn' take as long as milestone 3, but after seeing some of the suggestions presented to the team (via uf-discuss), I was really anxious to see any of it coming in a browser out-of-the-box, because believe me, it makes a huge difference having to install an add-on.</rant>

Still, there's tremendous work being done to make FF3 a hell of a release, so don't give up on the Fox just yet. I know I won't.

They even got Mr. Hicks working on a new logo, again! Yay!

Opera requests the Commission to implement two remedies to Microsoft’s abusive actions. First, it requests the Commission to obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop. Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.

Read the full press release.

In short, they want Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or supply alternative browsers. They also want Microsoft to put their money where their mouth is and start supporting standards, for real. I, for one, am still waiting on a fully XHTML capable Internet Explorer. Maybe in March.

Whoa! Can't go wrong there, can you? Who doesn't love to see any given corporation sticking up to Microsoft?

Well, it's not that simple.

No matter how much you curse at Microsoft every time you bump into a bug in IE. Neither does it matter how much you support webstandards. I'm not questioning those things. Despite all that, this action cannot be taken lightly. Just like Andy Clarke points out in his CSS Unworking Group, Opera and Microsoft are both in the CSS Working Group, which is currently working on the CSS3 specification. Are things going to be affected by the outcome of this legal action? Who knows... And are the browser vendors the people we want in charge of building the next batch of standards for our dear web? Makes you think, doesn't it?

Furthermore, the whole press release stinks of a cheap publicity stunt. Right on the first paragraph they call themselves the only company that can put the Web on any device. Not only that, they also sprinkled the press release page with links to their products. To top it off, the "About Opera" text they have been including in their previous Press Releases has been re-done.

They have every right to brag. They have, indeed, been doing remarkable work in bringing the web to mobile devices and game consoles. Well done there... but those are just some of the reasons why this whole thing makes me suspicious.

As far as the complaint goes, I still think an operating system without a browser is incomplete, specially nowadays. Either they start carrying binary versions of other browsers in the OS installation disk – which would get stale very fast – or they force the user to download the latest versions, which adds a requirement to have internet access before having a browser.

Regardless of the technicalities... I'd like to leave a question for you all to think about.

If the lack of choice in Windows environments are annoying them so much, why aren't they filing the same complaint, only targeting everyone's beloved Apple?

I'll dive right in. Here's a basic overview of what I did over there.

First, I'll leave you a quick index, to help you navigate through the post: Mobitags — GeoTourism — Estante.
(be careful when using inside an RSS reader, it will take you to my website)

As soon as I sat down in front of my trusty laptop (soon to be replaced, sorry dude) I went through my notes to see what idea I would pick up first. I had scribbled down on my moleskine a couple of ideas I had had through the previous week. First up? A very simple script that grabbed a feed from a user of SAPO Tags (sort of del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, the latter being my favorite) and display it using QR codes. Thus came to be...

Mobitags!

I'm not very imaginative when it comes to names, I know.

You can see it working here: http://codebits.andr3.net/mobitags/.

Here's a screenshot:

Click for a bigger version. Use it with a Phone + Kawya Reader to see it action.

As I mentioned on my 90 sec. presentation, this was a pretty quick hack (under an hour, including walking around the venue thinking and talking to Pedro) which I thought would be the tone of the competition. I didn't think so many people would go up there and show entire products, polished and all. No biggie. I don't take myself that seriously to be worried about presenting a less-than-useful hack on stage.

I did however, learned a valuable lesson. No matter what, always prepare your presentation. Not until 15 minutes before the start of the presentations did I realize I wouldn't have a webcam on-stage. I would want people to see the mobile phone converting the code to a valid URL and opening it. I took quick snapshots on my webcam but they were too lousy to use.

On top of all that, I forgot to plug the ethernet cable to the laptop! Since I presented on Pedro's laptop and he didn't have built-in wifi, I was Internet-less on stage, presenting a demo which required to fetch a live feed (the cache I used had a ttl of only 1 minute.) Great! When it failed, I pulled a printed paper out of my pocket and proceeded to make a fool out of myself.

I (think I) mentioned it would be cool to have, at a conference, a screen giving out links to mobile websites regarding each speaker/presentation. It works great on screens. Papers? Only if well lit. However, I did forget to mention this can be easier to explain than teaching people to open up browser, look for an address input option and navigate to some long URL.

Like so: "1. Click this icon here (Kaywa Reader). 2. Point at the mark and click. 3. Bang! You're in!".

This basically grabs a feed and spits the images corresponding to each item's link. If you wish to have the code or if you want me to allow specifying a specific feed instead of leaving this attached to SAPO Tags, let me know. :)

GeoTourism

Apart from that, I teamed up with Nuno Loureiro and Carlos Pires to try and leverage the information spit out by the GIS SAPO webservice. Powerful resource! Expect great things to be built on top of it.

Our idea was... group all the GIS categories (through a quick card-sorting at high hours) and allow users to "search" all Points of Interest by District. We would then show some information gathered from Wikipedia and on top of that fetch pictures of said location through the Geographic search on Flickr.

It would answer the questions: What's to see? What is it? Where is it? And what does it look like?

After some hard work on behalf of Carlos to extract information from Wikipedia and some feed re-hashing (XML from GIS into GeoRSS), we managed to plot POIs in a Yahoo Maps, since SAPO Mapas doesn't support GeoRSS.

We hit a wall – or should I say, I did – on Flickr. The bastards wouldn't return any hit when I provided geo coordinates from pictures on Flickr World Map. No matter what the precision, it would never return a single photo!

Carlos ended up presenting it as it was, albeit incomplete. Kudos to him.

(sorry, no screenshots of this. Maybe later)

Estante

Meanwhile, while talking to Pedro we ended up choosing our project. We would take advantage of Amazon Web Services (the catalogue part) and SAPO Webmail for Login and Address Book contacts.

In a nutshell, it's a service that allows you to build up your stock/portfolio/collection/whatever of CDs, DVDs and Books. It searches Amazon and presents you the covers.

After adding to your collection, you can then lend items to friends on your SAPO Webmail Address Book. Both of you should receive notification and you could schedule a deadline for returning the item. You and him/her would then be notified.

On top of that, we allowed you to search SAPO Fotos with automatically generated tags, based on your collection. For instance, search photos of Cure or Pearl Jam and you could find people who are into the same music as you are. As Pedro put it quite well on stage, a sort of manual social network, sort of. hehe

The 90 second elevator-pitch went well, not without some glitches. Pedro's laptop was stubborn and would not show any video. They skipped him a couple of times until lo and behold! there it was, Estante in all its glory! Our idea was to keep the input as simple as possible and as Paulo Trezentos – who I confused for someone from Outsystems! So sorry about that – told us right after Pedro sat down, it would be awesome if we could send messages via email to lend an item to someone. We told him that was our plan. To allow different gateways for the service. (We received some more positive feedback.)

Well, if you watched the 90 sec pitch and thought "hey, I could use that", be glad. Pedro and I decided even before the presentation that we would continue to develop Estante after Codebits, no matter what.

Mário Valente has given us some tips and for the next couple of months I should talk about this again. We'll try to build a good way of creating a catalogue and record the lending of your own items to friends. We don't want to hear about people losing their CDs or DVDs just because they forgot who has them. (It happens to everyone)

Disclaimer: we know about the desktop app for the Mac, Delicious Library. I love it, it's a great piece of software. But it's hermetic. It's closed down on each other's desktop. We want to open it up! Allow people to interact with their collection of items from everywhere! Exhibit your last purchases... etc. We are open to suggestions, so let us have it! Good or bad.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the service.

And that's it. Now I'd like to share some lessons I learned during this great amazing outstanding awesome event. The Eddie Izzard kind of 'awesome'.

Lessons learned

• Get some sleep! I decided to stay the whole night, only laying down for 1-2 hours of sleep. Big mistake. The following day I saw pretty much every one live and fresh. I was more zombie-like. It felt totally uncomfortable and I wasn't up to par when my time came up to present my project in 90 seconds. I was everything but focused.
• Choose ONE project and focus! I thought there would be more small hacks. That's why I did mobitags. I then enrolled on two other teams. Which, when the time was coming up, I was like a madman running here and there, merging and deploying stuff. Stressful times on a non-stressed event? No thanks. I also felt I didn't give my best to any of the teams. Sorry guys.
• Leave some time to Network. Yes, don't spend all your time at the PC. The only networking I did was with guys I already knew. I talked to Fred, Pedro Mendes, André Ribeirinho, Bruno Pedro and all the guys from work. Not many *new* connections. Bummer.

That's all folks!

I'm scouring the web for projects that came out of SAPO Codebits, so if you have one, let us know about it.

Day one

Mike Culver from Amazon presented their S3, EC2 and SQS (were there others?). Even though it all sounded like marketing, the guy made sense. Nothing new if you're into AWS, but still, a very valuable presentation. Specially when they've just announced an European Center. Later, talking to him, he told me they're looking for an evangelist here in Europe, to live in Luxembourg. I asked him if that's where their data centers are situated to which he replied Can't say, sorry. I would use traceroute, though.... Very nice guy to talk with, that's for sure.

Curious thing about Mike's presentation: he showed a timeline, in which he plotted the dotcom bubble between 97 and 2001. He did the same with Web2.0 between 2004 and the end of 2006. According to him, now is the time for Webscale Computing. Marketing-mumbo-jumbo? Maybe... But when I came downstairs, I noticed some presentation going on in P2 (?). I could see from the distance the words "Web2.0, um novo conceito" - which translates to "Web2.0, a new concept". Way different realities, no?

After that, I caught the amazing presentation on Unicode Poetry, by Cláudio Valente. Please, if you work with computers, you should watch that.

The first day came to an end much quicker than I expected, but not before watching Fred deliver a great presentation on Building platforms. He was pretty much spot on, as usual, in terms of what's hot on the web right now. When you have LOLCATS, Microformats, OpenID, OAuth in the same presentation, you know you're on the right track.

One thing that caught me by surprise was that at the end, all questions were about our dearest microformats! At least one even came from a Microsoft zealot. Funny, no? Nevertheless, I spoke up only to clear some possible doubts after listening Fred talking about Microformats as APIs for developers to scrape data easily off of websites. Well said, but I wanted people who never heard of them to get the story straight. It's targeted at end-users and that's where we're heading. Firefox 3 will support it... Opera has talked about it. Apple seems to be interested as well, but the dev community will get there before Apple do, with a future plugin for Safari being developed already. I talked to him afterwards, no harm done. I was afraid I had come across a bit cocky... but he was ok with it, he thanked me. Cool guy, he is.

Day two/three

Yes, to me, they're glued together with only two hours of sleep.

It started early with one of the nicest dudes I met recently on stage. Cláudio Gamboa's presentation) on Lib.SAPO.JS started waaaaay too early (scheduled for 9am). Still, they shifted it half an hour forward, to wait for some late attendees (amongst whom, I was shamefully included). I caught the whole thing and it was great. I'm still much more fond of JQuery, but I recognize the value of an utility-filled library. I'll definitely consider using Lib.SAPO.JS for my next personal project.

After that, there was a bit of a confusion with the schedule. I ended up watching a bit of Eduardo Pinto presenting RSS, the XML Democrat. I liked it a lot, showing off what you could achieve with such a generic format. Even though it wasn't highly technical nor earth shattering, it was definitely useful for this kind of event and some of the guys there really looked interested.

Quick lunch and we were onto the hacking!

I'll actually leave the projects I was involved with for a follow-up post. Hopefully tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Organization

Everyone involved in putting all of this together should now take the time to take a step back and just enjoy. Enjoy the gratitude of 500+ geeks who were a part of the biggest and best event from Portuguese to Portuguese. Yes, we had Mike joining us, but now, HE was the foreigner.

It was unbelievable! We had everything at our disposal... Segways, XBOX 360s, a Wii, (lots of) pizza, snacks, fruit, regular drinks, energy drinks, coffee... you name it. I believe the big picture here is the "reconciliation" (if they were ever separated) of the developer community and SAPO/PT. They really put their hearts into this and pretty much everyone was saying how great it was to have this kind of events here. I'm sure the next barcamp will be bigger and better. The next Shift, much more attendees. At least I hope so, and I hope we can all turn our heads back and see where all of this national internet awareness spurted; SAPO Codebits, where else?

Where's Waldo andr3? (Photo by Isa Costa)

Further Reading

What everyone is saying throughout the interweb:

• Macacos.com: Codebits dia 1 (pt)
• Macacos.com: Codebits dia 2 (pt)
• Macacos.com: Codebits dia 3 (pt)
• Vida Colectiva: Codebits chega ao fim (pt)
• Brainstorm: SAPO Codebits - o rescaldo (pt)
• Nuno's Blog: SAPO Codebits is over (pt)
• Mário Valente: Codebits is over (tip: #31 was a project of Billy and me)
• Photos by Delfim (pt)
• Photos by Sil (pt)

More and more should be popping up on Technorati.

First of all, it's a misleading name — Open Social. After they got Brad Fitzpatrick, author of the iconic Thoughts on the Social Graph, by choosing this name people get the idea they may be attacking the concepts described in that article.

But they're not.

What is it, then?

In short, Google's Open Social are APIs which social networks (Hi5, Last.fm, SAPO Spot, etc.) may choose to implement to allow third party developers to create web applications that will run on their users' profiles. In layman's terms, it's a way to do what Facebook did, but for all social networks out there who decide to jump on the bandwagon, only with a certain twist:

• Open Social is a javascript API
• Doesn't require developers to learn specific languages (like in Facebook)
• Doesn't have the lock-in factor that fb does
• Every social network can now choose to implement it allowing all webapps written for Open Social to be "ported" to their network!

It doesn't solve the utopia dream desire for each user to truly own their online identity & relationships, nor does it solve the problem of portability, at least not out-of-the-box.

One may argue that it allows certain apps to be created - and ported to different networks - that would allow this trade of information (microformats being key players in this). But that depends on whether apps will be able to extract information from/to other websites. Javascript is pretty powerful, but when it comes to cross-site-scripting (XSS), we have to get inventive.

Now what?

If you own a network and you're willing to join the party, you have to implement the Service Provider Interface (SPI), which apparently isn't available yet. Get in touch with them...

For us, developers, it's time to explore the docs and play a little in the orkut sandbox. As other networks expose their Open Social APIs, things will start to get - even more - interesting. But please... a word of caution to everyone: don't rush it into production. Learn from other people mistakes. As soon as the announcement was made, even before the website went live, plaxo officials were already posting a message to the Social Network Portability mailing list saying they would have it implemented by Friday. The result? First OpenSocial Application Hacked Within 45 Minutes [techcrunch]. Now the question is... is this an OpenSocial or a Plaxo flaw?

(Can someone, please, pronounce the death of Web 2.0?)

Further Reading

Read what some of the experts are saying:

• Open, by Jeremy Keith
• OpenSocial and portability by Tantek Çelik

Apparently, there's still work for Brad to do over there. :)

Could someone please explain me the reasoning which lead these +2000 people to download an already free album? Giving away free music is not enough to keep your music off the p2p networks.

Possible explanations

(leave your suggestion in the comments)

• Bandwidth caring fans want to take some weight off the servers
• Revenge companies who now hold a grudge against this initiative might have inserted fake torrents to dismay some fans, but why so many seeds??
• Speed faster than downloading from a single server? I've tried it and their server is pretty fast.
• Old habits die hard?
• ...?

John Hicks:

Personally, I’m just happy that we’re reaching a point where we’re having this conversation! I want to be able to specify a face, and enable everyone to see it, without resorting to the image replacement and SiFR workarounds.

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/fonts-in-your-face

John Gruber:

The conundrum is that most of the fonts worth using can’t legally be shared as free downloads, and most of the fonts that are legally shareable aren’t worth using.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/october#thu-04-coles

First Opera announced it on @media, now WebKit gets behind this too.

One more thing...

As if that wasn't enough to bring you fuzzy feelings, Native DOMContentLoad event is coming to WebKit, as announced by Simon Willison. Great news, as well! It's a much needed native event! Is the W3C listening? ;)

Once again, the Future of Web Apps went by and I missed it! This time around I didn't sweat it, because if all goes well, I'll get the conference-in-a-box edition. Hope so.

I won't go through the entire schedule, but I'll try gather as much links as possible I find as the aftermath of the event.

• Slideshare FOWA07 group, hopefully it will grow.
• James Galvin speaks his mind, includes diggnation episode recorded at fowa07
• Andrew Bates summarizes Dapper presentation
• Andrew Bates summarizes Pownce presentation
• Andrew Bates summarizes Paul Graham's Presentation
• Steve Souders present High Performance websites, video not from FOWA but apparently it was pretty similar.

I'll update the list as I go. Suggest links below, in the comments. Thanks.

First of all, I find it weird that two conferences so closely related were scheduled to the exact dates. I'm sure some people wanted to attend both but were forced to make a choice.

Anyway, let me just say I find it amazing to see such names as Tantek Çelik, Jeremy Keith, Jeff Veen and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (even if only his virtual-self was there) being part of a conference just next door to Portugal. Hopefully we can also get some high-profile speakers like that to visit our modest little country. ;)

Moving on, I've scoured the web looking for presentations, blog posts, etc., but so far, I haven't been that lucky. Let's see:

• Bulletproof Ajax (Jeremy Keith), notes by Daniel Burriel
• Bulletproof Ajax (Jeremy Keith), notes by José Pita
• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (Jeff Veen), notes by Daniel Burriel
• Reflexiones después de Fundamentos Web 2007, some thoughts about the conference (Spanish)
• Después de Fundamentos Web 2007, again thoughts about the conference (Spanish)
• La web que viene, in El Pais (Spanish)

Babelfish is your friend.

I'm sorry for not having any more presentations to post, but if I find them, I'll update this post and save them to my Ma.gnolia. So check back later or follow the RSSes (blog, lifestream).

Feel free to contribute some links, just spit them over to the comment box, below. Cheers.