6 posts tagged “rss”

I was finally able to log in and see something besides the down page over at Tribe.net and I've gotta say, the new look is a marked improvement over the previous one, once you get used to it.

Some additional features were added but they're not immediately obvious including the ability to add blog RSS feeds to your MyTribe.net page, drag and drop of modules on that page and tons of other new UI changes including a new, smaller, more adult-oriented masthead and an old school-look logo.

Additionally, many of the pages that had been previously buried have resurfaced again in the browse menu like Reviews and other items that had been deemed less important to be able to access easily under the previous CEO.  There's also a new my friends'  photos module, a calendar module for the MyTribe.net page and a new official Tribe.net blog that's actually an RSS-enabled tribe.  All tribes on Tribe.net have featured RSS capabilities for some time but being able to add modules to your MyTribe.net page that are feeds of your tribes is all new as of today.

There are a few items that have to be cleaned up in a point release at some point but so far, it's looking like the good old Tribe.net we all used to love with some slight adjustments to the UI and several long awaited new features.  I was salivating at the thought of being able to read my blog feeds from MyTribe.net and having the drag and drop functionality that was discussed when I still worked for the company, and now it's finally here!

To add a feed module to your MyTribe.net page, click the customize your homepage link at the top of the Home page after logging in, and then choose which module you'd like to add from the list.  The list of items is different depending on whether your configuring your MyTribe.net page or your profile.  Some new modules have been added to the outward-facing profile stable of modules as well.  More on them below.

In addition to the previously supported MyRevver video module, YouTube, and GoogleVideo modules have been added and XPSF file formats are now supported with new modules in the user profile configuration area of the site.  To see the new modules, log in and click to your profile page [the icon in the upper left corner of the page or choose profile from the My pop-up], then click the Add Modules tab and select any of the existing or new modules from there.

XPSF, for the technically handicapped, is an XML file format for sharing music playlists.  Click the link XPSF for more info on where to find these playlists, or how to create your own.

Nice work Tribe guys!  I was reporting bugs just like back in the good ol' days today.  I'm really happy that the folks there are stoked to come in to work again.  Morale had gotten pretty low there towards the end of my tenure. 

Myspace recently surpassed 100 million profiles and as a former measly black box QA engineer of the largely S.F. Bay Area alternative lifestyle-populated Tribe.net social networking site, my co-workers and I watched the meteoric Myspace rise occur as Tribe.net continued to be mostly a failure to launch outside of the Bay Area.  There were many good ideas floating around at Tribe in various directions but nothing we did seemed to create that viral growth that the now Fox News-owned Myspace has been experiencing for almost two years now. 

Looking back, it appears that the combination of a much younger sign up age, allowing people to hack the HTML and Javascript on their profile pages, adding a Flash-based MP3 player for song upload and playback, as well as providing a myriad of band-focused features for promoting the artist's music and shows via the Myspace events calendar and invitation system, is largely what fueled the incredible growth rate of the site.  There are probably some additional unknown factors that are important to the site's growth rate as well but the feature items outlined above, especially the addition of the Flash player and band-focused features, appear to coincide with the incredible growth that started for them about two years ago.

To celebrate the Myspace 100 million user plateau, I thought it might be fun to roast the site a bit and point out some of the many reasons that it continues to underwhelm from a technology perspective.  The opinions here are largely speculative as I'm not a web developer or designer and my opinions are based mostly on conversations I've had with extremely talented and capable web designers and engineers about the technologies in use and many Myspace articles I've read online about the site over the years;  Some of which may be partially or completely untrue.  My apologies in advance for any inaccuracies that may exist herein.

Myspace really has no web 2.0 features what-so-ever and the engine under the hood is notoriously unspectacular from what many people have said about the site's underlying core technology.  Here's my best take at the list of technological shortcomings of the site and a web 2.0 feature wish list compilation that was created based upon my experiences using Myspace over the last couple of years:

AJAX [Asynchronous Javascript and XML]: The typical web 2.0 site feature set includes functionality such as widgets or fields that load data without visibly reloading the page, allows the user to freely drag elements around on the page or enter data or search criteria and instantly receive feedback from the server to the page with no visible refresh of the entire page's user interface.  The data is populated in the correct location and the rest of the page remains static.  There are no AJAX-fied pages, widgets of features on Myspace;  It's all web 1.0, centralized portal, old school web site behavior.  Every new action requires that the page is refreshed completely.  This can be incredibly time consuming when the site is under a heavy load.

Folksonomies and tagging: Many of the new web 2.0 sites like Flickr.com, Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us YouTube and the new Six Apart product Vox in use for this blog provide support for user generated tags that can be associated with various data types such as photos, videos, posts, news articles, blogs, websites or any specific type of item that is featured on a given site.  These tags create a user defined "hierarchy" or "taxonomy" of sorts, often called a "folksonomy" that can then be catalogued and searched by tag to view or capture tag related content. 

A simple example of tagging can be seen on the site Flickr.com.  On Flickr's tags page, words like "sunset" or "architecture" can be clicked on and content tagged with those words is returned in the form or data type of photos, hopefully of sunsets and architecture. 

With any tag on Flickr.com, it is also possible to create an RSS feed of photos tagged with a particular word or phrase.  This can be useful on another website such as Tribe.net, where a user can publish a feed into an RSS-module, or in an application or online-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, NewsGator, My Yahoo!, or Bloglines, where the tagged photo content can be serialized or "syndicated" newest items first as images are posted to Flickr.  When a new photo with the tag "sunset" is added to the site by any Flickr user, that photo is now associated with that particular tag.  When the tag specific feed is retrieved by Tribe.net or Bloglines the most recent photos tagged "sunset" are collected.  The tagged photo content can then be viewed by the user of the stand-alone RSS reader application or feed aggregation site [Bloglines or Tribe.net as examples] and what is returned are photos taken by Flickr.com users of sunsets. 

Of course, the person that uploaded the photo needs to properly tag items and sometimes photos that are not actually sunsets or architecture-related photos might appear in a feed.  Additionally, items that don't have that tag associated with them might actually be photos of a sunset or architecture but without the tag, the photo isn't included in what is retrieved as a feed from Flickr.  Myspace doesn't currently provide a user interface for tagging any of its data types.  More on the Myspace and the RSS issue in the next paragraph...

RSS: Myspace also doesn't currently allow users to syndicate their blogs, photos or any other Myspace data type either.  What if Myspace users could syndicate or tag their blog entries, photos, videos, music or groups content on myspace.com so that people could subscribe to or utilize their tagging filters on Myspace user content elsewhere on the web to stay current with their friends or favorite bands activities?  Would individual profile users and musicians find that useful?  Isn't that the direction that most of these new companies are moving in?  Decentralization, RSS feeds, tagging, micro-content and data silos?  These kinds of fearures and many others, including desktop application-like behavior in a browser, and a robust web services API like eBay's or Flickr's are the kinds of concepts emerging from more and more web 2.0 sites and this is just the beginning of the madness.

Web services and APIs: Google Mashups are very good examples of Google's web services API [or application programming interface] in action.  The Google maps API combines their in-house maps technology and externally accessible web services so that outside developers can create useful new combinations that improve the efficiency of people's daily activities such as searching housing prices in a specific area or finding a restaurant close to your house or hotel.  I'm not sure that Myspace or any social networking site other than LinkedIn encourages people to be more efficient in their daily activities though;  Probably just the opposite for the most part.

Notes on a couple of interesting web 2.0 applications that some people might not be aware of: Google recently purchased the collaborative, online emulation of Microsoft's Word application, Writely, and another company's spreadsheet app so that they can offer products that are similar to Microsoft's Office suite, but that are free, collaborative [I said that already] and available online so that they can be accessed from anywhere, not just from the computer where the files are saved.  Yahoo! bought del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that is barebones yet very popular among geeky types for saving bookmarks just like a bookmark in your browser but available to the rest of the world, or just to you if you choose, at any computer with a browser on the internet that you happen to be using.  Social bookmarking is somewhat of a centralizing feature unlike some of the decentralizing applications I've been blathering about here but a very useful site none the less and del.icio.us supports tagging as well.  Myspace has no official web services or APIs for any of it's content types and again, no content tagging functionality.

Uploading MP3 files: When I first uploaded songs to my Myspace music profile, there was no descriptive help text or examples that outlined what kinds of MP3 files or what file size limits existed prior to the upload.  This was a really serious annoyance because of how long it took Myspace to report an error during the upload process.  Basically, files over about 9 MB, I never figured out exactly what the limit is, are too large and the upload process has to be revisited after the file has been re-encoded via an MP3 encoding application  from the original file at a lower bit rate that also reduces the file size, and along with it, the sound quality of the music that is uploaded to the site.  Guh.  No syndication and there's a limit of four songs total for each Myspace Music Profile as well so why would you want to syndicate that?

Search: Myspace currently has one of the worst search implementations I've ever seen.  Try searching for someone on the site and it's a virtual crapshoot that you'll actually find them or anything remotely relevant to them on the site.  By default it searches the web currently.  There is another search field that is somewhat useful if you know who or what you're looking for but it's buried on the right side of the initial search results page, provided that you clicked "Myspace" from the default "Web" search.

Most people don't save what's commonly referred to as a "handle" or custom URL that makes it easier to find them on Myspace as well [e.g., my handle: http://www.myspace.com/beliefsystems].  With a handle I can guess what the Myspace site URL for an music artist like Wolfmother or Ladytron is because they've had chosen a handle like "myspace.com/wolfmother" or "http://myspace.com/ladytron".  For people that don't have a saved handle, the user's GUID, or global user id is used and that's typically a fairly lengthy series of semi-serial, semi-randomized or encoded numbers and letters that are saved in the database that refer to a particular user.  I know this because this is what Tribe.net does and I've seen this ID in Myspace URLs many times when I visit people's profiles that don't have a custom URL.

On the search front, I did read an article today about a Google/Myspace deal that said Myspace will hand off its search functionality to Google, and Google in turn will pay Myspace's parent company Fox Interactive Media $900 million over the next three years for the privilege of being Myspace and Fox Interactive Media's default search engine.  $900 million over three years ain't too shabby for a service that cost Fox News' Fox Interactive Media unit about $580 million dollars to purchase from failed band member and myspace.com co-founder Tom Anderson and his investors.  We'll see how well the search integration turns out between the two companies very soon I guess.

Okay, so, I listed a number of reasons why myspace.com sucks and here's the second to last one...

Social distance and reputation: One of the more useful and important concepts of social networking is the concept of social reputation.  If you create a social reputation system for users of a site or service for items that were previously bought and sold as anonymous transactions you create a sense of trust between the buyer and seller.  Social reputation [hopefully] creates a network of trust that provides a path back to someone you know in your inner circle or "network" so that there's some accountability, depending on how far away from the first ring of friends you go. 

This is similar to what we see on auction site eBay with their positive feedback percentage or Slashdot's user score rating system but with social degrees for accountability and reputation as opposed to user feedback.  eBay users with very high user feedback are likely to be more trustworthy and Slashdot users with higher scores are likely to be more informative or relevant than some of the more fringe users of the site.  The basic idea is to provide a traceable reputation so that the kinds of Myspace news stories we're seeing on the 5 O'Clock news every night related to pedofiles and sexual predators wouldn't occur as often as they do.

Myspace is extremely one dimensional.  Everyone that creates an account on the site is by default friends with Tom and there's no concept of social degree or distance.  While everyone being friends with Tom makes it very easy for people like me to know the total number of Myspace profiles that exist in the system, it also flattens out the usefulness of social reputation so that you can't see how someone is related to you and decide based upon that additional information whether or not it's a good idea to add them as a friend, meet them in a park for coffee or work with them as a fashion model, etc.

The very last item on the list is simply the technology behind the site. 

Usability and load issues: Most everyone I know has commented on how slow or non-functional the site seems to be; probably related to the sheer volume of teenagers, musicians and groupies on at any given time, myself included [a musician not a groupie].  Not to mention all the video pop-ups, pimped out profiles with tiled, sparkling background photos, user customizations and Flash-based plug-ins typically implemented by hacking the HTML of a page to bend it to your will while wreaking havoc on your browser and computer memory.  The main reason for many of their failures though is the craptacular technology.  Mention Cold Fusion to a web developer or designer and watch him shiver at the thought of actually having to work with it.  Cold Fusion... very cold!

Myspace is a great resource for bands and there have been a couple of success stories [the Arctic Monkeys for instance] and it really fluffs the ego getting all kinds of friend requests from people that dig my stuff or event invitations to events that aren't even in my region but one of the most exciting things it's given me is the ability to connect with some of my techno heroes from back in "the good ol days" or bands I was into in the 80s, being a product of that decade unlike so many of the sites users.  So, there is some positive feedback on the Myspace experience.

And here some positives:  I've found many interesting and compelling new bands that liked my songs or my profile and asked to be friends.  I've had people from all over the world send me comments, personal messages or Thanks for the Add photos and text.  The mobile SMS notification feature is also something that we discussed implementing at Tribe.net a few times and Myspace has gotten that particular feature right.  I should also mention though that after the power outage in L.A. due to the early summer heat wave, Myspace stopped sending me any SMS messages about new personal messages, friend requests or event invitations for a couple of weeks.  That feature seems to be working a lot better lately however.

So, I hope Myspace gets on the technology ball, slowly migrates to a more robust technology platform and maybe someday adds a few new web 2.0 features but right now, it doesn't look like any of that is necessary.  The sheep are following the herd and the herd seems to be tearing off to Planet Myspace at an astronomical rate and shows no signs of slowing down to close the gate. 

Before myspace gets around to it, there might still a market out there for a website that is similar to myspace.com but that does what they do a lot better with robust web 2.0 features like RSS, AJAX, XHTML, a feature rich API, tagging and all of the other Semantic web buzzwords and new web design technologies us geeks are so fond of.  And while we're at it, a site that can handle such incredible growth and still keep it together functionally with very little down time, minimal database corruption or loss of user data.  Myspace has done pretty well with the database corruption and loss of user data items but downtime's another story...

I remember when myspace's "down page" used to have a PacMan game on it and I sometimes wished that the site would stay down a little longer so that I could play a little more.  Too bad it didn't stay down longer.  I might still have a job if it did.

The internet 100+ million list [from what I could find with a quick Google search]:

1. Chinese internet users
2. Skype registered users
3. MSN Hotmail users
4. PayPal users
5. YouTube videos served
6. Huawei mobile softswitch users [what the?]
7. HP Laser Jet printers shipped since 1984
8. Indian cell phone users
9. Number of Firefox downloads
10. US broadband users

And of course, Myspace profiles

I've compiled a long list of music to share thanks to iTunes new releases RSS feed and other off-the-beaten-track sources through which I've been collecting music. Here are a few samples of some of artists I've been impressed with of late:

First off is Mice Parade's fifth album, the 2005 release "Bem-Vinda Vontade" which loosely translates from Portuguese into "Welcome, Will".  This album can be considered the sister album, according to Fat Cat Records' website, the label that has released their albums, to last year's "Obrigado Saudade", which again loosely translates to "Thank you Nostalgia." 

The music on Bem-Vinda Vontade is somewhat reminiscent of early  "post-rock" artists Tortoise to the author and the songs, mostly written by multi-instrumentalist and MP founder Adam Pierce, are recorded "as-is" with no overdubs, usually in one take. 

According to the Fat Cat Records website blurb, some of the cuts may have been edited using a computer to shorten songs sections but the musicians playing the songs are all recorded in real time and mistakes are considered part of the natural human experience when playing together.

While it's easy to get that Bem-Vonda Vontade probably isn't for everyone, Mice Parade's latest offering could be the ideal soundtrack for doing one's homework assignment or sitting out on the patio or the front porch on a nice, breezy, summer afternoon.

Certainly, Mice Parade caters to an individual with a discerning, evolved taste in alternative music.  A listener familiar with artists such as Kevin Sheild's My Bloody Valentine, or Múm's folkish electronica [Kristin Valtýsdóttir of Múm sings on a few songs on the two sibling Mice parade releases] who appreciates recordings of live acoustic instrumental music captured "as it happened" with no overdubs, or compositing of multiple performances to artificially sweeten the musical experience.

Art Bleek - Between Yesterday & Tomorrow:

Art Bleek, aka Arthur Pochon, is a Paris, France-born and based, Berklee School of Music-trained saxophonist turned recording engineer and producer and with his latest release on Loungin Records, Bleek has entered the elite Hip Hop/Jazz fray with his first full-length Nu Jazz flavored Beyond Yesterday & Tomorrow album.

Following the October 21st, 2005 release of his Wanderer's Creek EP, Beyond Yesterday & Tomorrow pushes the Nu Jazz, hip hop fusion further into the musical stratosphere with several guest jazz musicians and MCs appearing on six of the collections 13 songs.  There's also an ample helping of spacey, down tempo instrumentals on the album as well. 

While not all of the songs on the album especially appealed to the author, the fusion of jazz with down tempo and electronica is a relatively new genre that is worth getting your head around.  There is something here for almost any music enthusiast with a discerning taste, a respect and admiration for Jazz and an appreciation of the melding of down tempo and the improvisational musicianship associated with the Nu Jazz movement that has been expanding and evolving for quite some time now.

Art Bleek also has an ambient/experimental side with his alter-ego B[e]SIDE project that can be sampled on myspace as well.

Beyond Yesterday and Tomorrow's track breakdown:

Vocal tracks:
Another Island: featuring Aida Khaan & Ulrich Miljavac
Between Yesterday & Tomorrow: featuring Airelle Besson
Get Your Weight Up: featuring DJ Pudgemc & Tha Blacknificent
Spicy Cinnamon: featuring B.O.B. and Synna
Dangerous Woman: featuring Charlie Sputnik
Early Memory: Benjamin Degrandsart

Instrumentals:
Wanderer's Creek [check out the stand out remix on the Wanderer's Creek EP, Umodomu's Mix]
Phillie's Special Night
Five in the Morning
Airgasm
Nighthawk's at Phillie's
Art's Mood
Terrace

I was gonna do one more artist but I'm tired and it's getting late.  Lots more to come in all different genres and styles though.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

So, I guess I missed the RSS memo earlier today and didn't catch this item: NBC rumored to buy Tribe.net, the place I worked for two years until April 26th of this year.  The post appeared sometime in the AM today on TechCrunch via bloglines for me, and I'm sure on tons of other blogs across the blogosphere too.  Not sure what site posted the story first though. 

From what I could glean, initial rumors have said that the purchase price was going to be somewhere in the 50 million dollar ballpark but some were speculating that the story was premature [I hate it when things happen prematurely, not that they happen for me of course] altogether and the actual price might be somewhere in the less spectacular 5 million range.  Another speculative thread I found mentioned that there was a 50-50 chance that NBC would even pull the trigger on the deal.

Well, I guess Tribe.net's significantly counter culture crowd might just have to come in from the desert and visit civilization in the iVillage if this all comes to pass.  Oy...  Sorry.  Tribe.net would certainly benefit from more women on the site [you know iVillage, what?  you never heard of iVillage?].  Too bad Tribe never added music.  I wonder if those stock options I didn't purchase are 1) going to worth anything and 2) if they can still be bought.  Hmmm.  Here's some more of the Tribe.net purchase banter that actually appeared on Tribe.net in the Tribe Ideas tribe.  I feel horribly redundant right now:

http://tribeideas.tribe.net/thread/3b455fe5-b55f-4aac-bb6a-c83dd85d0d1b

So, I am a big fan of the new web 2.0, websites-that-behave-like-desktop-applications movement that's a foot right now.  I've got all the buzz words spinning around in my noggin too: folksonomy, AJAX, RSS, XML, Podcasts, Vodcasts, even OPML and tagging but one of my pet peeves currently is the lack of support for my favorite Mac-only browser Safari.

Safari is a fabulous browser and I use this wonderful $6 patch application called Saft with it that remembers all kinds of things like browser tab sets [some of you IE'rs don't even have tabs yet; how can you live like that!], crashed browser tabs resets, window positions, search without having to type Command + F and page dragging with the control key down for starters.  There are tons of other reasons why I love Safari and would hate to have to abandon it.  There's the fact that I've got the key equivalents down for changing from the current tab to the previous or next page and the page reload and back and forth and page source key equivalents are embedded in my brain as well.

But one unfortunate and somewhat major feature missing in Safari is support by a lot of the new web 2.0 applications that have been cropping up all over the place lately.  Here's a short list of new sites that don't support Safari right now:

Writely [online Word document replacement app]
Vox [this site's create post tool specifically doesn't function in Safari]
Google Spreadsheets [For you know, spreadsheets]
Gliffy [a Visio replacement]
Yahoo!'s new mail app [this app looks a lot like Outlook now]
Wet Paint [an allegedly wiki-based website creation tool that says nothing about wikis anywhere in the help]
Plaxo's new UI [it balked when I attempted to upload my .vcf file from Address Book]
...and I'm sure many more that I didn't mention here as well.

So, what I'm wondering is, what does Apple have to do to get more support for the open source Web Kit-based Safari application?  Right now, when I want to post to Vox, I have to open Camino, a little known star system where the clones were created, um, I mean a little known Mac-only browser that is a Mozilla variant to post to my fabulous Vox account.  I seriously hope all of us boutique Mac users get Safari support in some of these new apps soon or I'll have to find Saft for one of these other browsers and come in from the code jungle that is Safari and use Firefox or Camino for browsing the net.  That will be sad day.

Ars Technica's RSS feed via my bloglines account posted an article about a theoretical "cloaking device" like the one used on board attack spaceships by Klingons [no inappropriate jokes about where these guys come from please] to hide their position in space so that Capts. Kirk and Picard couldn't figure out where to shoot at them.

The proposed technology as theorized by professors from the University of Utah and Sydney would employ the principle of anomalous localized resonance via superlenses placed very close to small objects that could mask much of the perceived lightwaves by resonating at the same frequency. 

The technology is entirely theoretical at this point and the math has only been done for a particle as small as a speck of dust but future versions may include larger objects.  Fascinating stuff tho.  Here's the link in case you missed it above:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6744.html