Loja Apple Portugal Online..

Add comment November 15th, 2007

10+10 Google Golden Rules

Just read on Bruno’s blog TEN golden rules/principles that I couldn’t really agree more! From his visit to Google Zürich’s headquarters he managed to collect “TEN principles of Google Engineering/Software Development”:

1. Single-source code repository for all Google code (G has a rather big repository, and all engineers have access to the source code)
2. Developers can checkin fixes for any Google product (an “open-source” approach)
3. You can build any Google product in three steps (get, configure, make)
4. Uniform coding standards (how should code “look”) across the company
5. Mandatory code reviews before checkin (if a developer fixes a bug in Gmail, the fix needs to be approved by the Gmail team)
6. Pervasive unit testing (a “unit” is the smallest testable part of a program; unit testing validates that it works properly)
7. Test run continuously, emails get sent (automatically) to developers if any failure is spotted
8. Powerful tools that are shared companywide
9. Rapid project-cycles, developers change projects often, and can devote 20% of their time to pursuing whatever idea/project they want (if it gets somewhere, Google will then throw some more engineers at it and turn it into a product or a feature)
10. Peer-driven review process, flat management hierarchy

and as if this ten weren’t already some amazing good advice for anyone involved in development these days, Bruno also mentioned some other “TEN (amazingly simple) things Google has found to be true“:

1. Focus on the USER and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Amazing, yet so powerful tips if you managed to put them to pratice wisely and effectively, no?

1 comment September 25th, 2007

SAPO CODE BITS

Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:

and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!

The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!

We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:

Time as come for all of you geeks in the closet to come out, so I really hope we can all meet up in November in Lisbon!!

4 comments September 21st, 2007

Playstation 3 Home

Took them some time, but the first images of the online social network for Sony’s Playstation 3 kind of seem in the right direction. You can see the video on directly on YouTube, or watch it here:

1 comment September 15th, 2007

MICROFORMATS: getting mainstream?

Being a fan of the so called Semantic Web and knowing the long way we still have to track to reach it, all the things that takes us a bit closer to it has me on board. So it has been with Microformats, I had played a bit with Structured Blogging before but rapidly moved to what was ended up being known by Microformats for their multipurpose and not just for blogging.

A brief introduction for non-geek persons about Microformats and why they’ll became ever so important: The web is full of information, trapped information, hidden relations, hidden contents, consider for instance a simple news article, a review in a product page, that information is trapped under the rumble of it’s page HTML. Not nice, isn’t it? Through the separation of layout/content we already improved, since we can read each one of those examples hiding the details of the document structure focusing on the information thats important!

Being intelligent beings as we tend to consider ourselves, we have the ability to spot which parts of the information are relevant, if I look at a contact page, I immediately search for something that looks like an address, phone or email contact. It’s something we’re used to. Well the problem raises that when it matters with information we really can’t depend on humans!

To a program reading a regular webpage, all that rumble and layout information, etc. is just the same! That’s were Microformats became essential! They allow us to seemingly “format” that information, so that humans and machines alike are able to extract the REALLY important parts! Microformats are much more than that, but for today’s introduction that the key idea to retain.

After some of the big companies embraced them a few months ago, Microformats seemed to be on the right track for massive adoption, and yesterday the all mighty W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) seems to have given a step the consolidation of Microformats by providing a set of use cases (GRDDL) that provide real-world scenarios and examples of Microformat in use, as they quote it:

(…) GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the data they wish to share into a format that can be used and transformed again for more rigorous applications.
(…)
Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion to other formats.(…)

I strongly suggest reading some of thew3c use cases:

• Use case #1: Scheduling.
• Use case #2: Single-purpose XML records.
• Use case #3: Aggregating Reviews.
• Use case #4: Digital Libraries and Content Managment.
• Use case #5: Meta powered Wiki.
• Use case #6: XForms.
• Use case #7: XML schemas.
• (…)

As complementary to the Microformats Website, the nice to have in hand Microformats Cheat Sheet and the book written by John Allsopp: “Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 “

For people reading this here in the Portuguese quarter I promise that in coming weeks you’ll get your opportunity to learn a bit more about Microformats! enough said!

2 comments September 13th, 2007

Nationwide Alert System or Emergency Twittering

A lot of people argue that services like Twitter, Jaiku and more recently Pownce, are mere services aimed to boost our egos, services born to increase our already ego-flooded world, it might or not be truth, it’s a fact that a lot of their users simple use it to broadcast short status messages with few or no interest at all! It’s my belief that these particular services are the beginning of something unique simply because their particularly different from previous messaging services, and departing from this idea I’ll explain why I believe that we need a nationwide Twitter!

Twitter is much more than a messaging system, it’s a unique multi-platform broadcasting system. Like we’ve witnessed in the past with radio, which was used to helped distribute messages from different services across, simply and quickly, so is Twitter doing it somehow! Two different features in Twitter seem to me the groundbreaking, first it’s a internet based broadcasting network: my message is sent across a multitude of people and mediums originating from the internet, second it’s bridge for inter-connecteness with other systems: by using it’s Twitter public API we’re able to connected to it any system that outputs messages. In the end the process is simple: a message sent from the web, reaches people on their instant messengers, mobiles, or on their contacts page on the service website. The other-way around also applies.

The idea of a nationwide Twitter just pleases me because I tend to be more comfortable the more informed I am: I (unfortunately) have this deeper sense that in the event of something important I’d be the last to know!!

Cellphones don’t handle crises situations nicely! In case of a network breakdown, they’re dead in the sea, so we have to create something more reliable and universal. In the past, pretty much everyone had a radio, so trusting the radio was the obvious choice. Today, due to many factors no technology seems to be such common place, we have to consider that in the advent of something people will have different means depending on where they are at the moment, it could be a computers, a radios, or a simple cellphone, so we really need to have that in mind.

I would wish we could have a multi-plaform nationwide alert system, something that everyone interested, national citizen or not, could subscribe and register with different ids for different alert channels. When some relevant thing happens on the channels I’ve subscribed the system would broadcast an alert on all the mediums I’ve registered for being notified. This would assure that, when needed, the information would reach me somehow.

Everyday I see the more and more services using Twitter massive broadcasting platform for delivery updates on their interests. In Portugal we have Público, that through twittering is in fact delivering alerts for every breaking news they publish on their site.

So it’s probably just a matter of time before we actually see it being used for as multi-channel alert system, at least the “media” is doing it already!

The only reason I think Twitter wouldn’t make it, it’s related to the fact that I think this system should be managed by some Official Emergency Department to avoid and prevents it’s abuse or deviation and therefore ruin it’s success as emergency broadcast system.

Any comments on this?

3 comments September 12th, 2007

Social Networks Bill of Rights

Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authered a proposal for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web/Networks available under the Open Social Web website.

According to this proposition for a bill of rights, every Social Network and/or Application should guarantee 3 fundamental USER rights

• Ownership of their own personal information: own profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

which in practice means that this services should display the following features:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

As further reading about this interoperability problem between different services and networks, I strongly suggest that you watch both Brad’s Fitzpatrick slides and read his “Thoughts on the Social Graph”:

Add comment September 8th, 2007

BARCAMP Portugal 2007

UPDATE: I took some pictures during the Barcamp and posted them on my Flickr account.

Just a quick reminder that the second Barcamp Portugal is taking place this weekend in Coimbra! The hard work of organizing it was once again the work of the WeBreakStuff team, so a special thanks to them for it!

For those of you guys that never took place in one, don’t let this one pass you by, the Barcamp are particular interesting for networking. Barcamp’s informality is well renowned and the fact that there’s no prior schedule or program kind of leaves us, the attendees, all somehow responsible for it’s success!

I think the original ground rule of the Barcamp was PARTICIPATE, meaning everyone attending had to present about something, doesn’t had to technical or meaningfull either, but everyone had to present something. Knowing the portuguese quarter a little bit, I’ll know we’re certain to find the usual suspects speaking, but I take this opportunity to reinforce the open invitation for participation, I personally I would love to hear less of the usual suspects, where I include myself!

If you’re interested, but nevertheless can’t afford to be there for some reason, please refer to the BarCamp Wiki page, there you’ll find all the updated information, presentations and scary pictures that took place there.

Add comment August 31st, 2007

Digital Identity Mapping

It’s not new, but I Just came across Fred’s nice map about digital identity:

it’s missing some more recent services, like twitter, but nevertheless is a nice visualization of all the facets available to help us build our digital persona.

Add comment March 28th, 2007

LIFT07: Wikipedia and it’s doomed end!

You have got to love the web, especially when some of the crazy ideas run off and get wild, I was going start posting my personal notes on the LIFT presentations I’ve watched while there. And since it’s seems there’s quite a buzz out there around what Florence Devouard said and didn’t say I’ll just help by posting my personal notes from her presentation.

Florence, presented Wikipedia as the most important social innovation online, pretty much all of us already have that in mind, but it’s never enough to actually hear it one more time, the truth is that Wikipedia is the best and probably most used example of user participation, co-creation, knowledge sharing that coined us the somehow the term web2.0, which I’ll refer as only the social web from now on, since this 2.0 thing really bugs me.

Wikipedia is a community based environment, comprehending today around 250 languages, some of them which don’t even have paper counterparts. “The idea behind encyclopedias should be radical”, it should stop being safe, which brings some clear advantages to Wikipedia, by collecting locally their collecting globally knowledge instead of focusing on just a version of the facts, their in fact collecting all the possible points of view from each subject.

Wikipedia today, not only collects huge sets of data, and that was one of the problems Florence addressed on her presentation, and brought her idea of Wikipedia being a cool utopia, which might not be sustainable as it is, which is radically different from saying that Wikipedia might actually close doors.

Wikipedia is reactive, in a sense that there’s not restraint to the information sharing and there’s a surprising care from users, and contributer for the information actually available on wikipedia, they not only nurture the critical mind but they also set their mission on informing rather and manipulating. Wikipedia faces vandalism, it’s a fact, but their response times, are not only impressive, but also pretty good, they have people watching every bit of content and empowered to actually repair the damage made. The so called {{SO FIX IT}} culture, empowering the individual rather than the organization, how wikipedia actually opts out for opening the gates rather then closing them.

The question of sustainability of Wikipedia, as we know it, probably arise after Florence actually presented some growth numbers: at the beginning there was only one server, in 2004 wikipedia became 4 servers, and today’s numbers sort of let us thru the wikipedia really growth measure: 350 servers, 6 millions articles, and 50000 user accounts, it’s impressive to say the least, an impressively expensive structure in fact. Florence actually said that right now, the foundation only had money to cover it’s operations for the next 3 months, BUT, and here’s where people seem to have get it wrong, they had people doing projections for the next two years, so the idea of Wikipedia closing down in 3 months was more than catastrophic. What she asked for, was in fact for the support of everyone present, and she did rightfully so, one of wikipedia main income sources, comes from a steadily source of donations, which right now kind of guarantees their sustainability for quite some months, as long as the projects in growth are right.

Florence also talked about internal changes, like employees, right now around wikipedia seems to have 10 real employees to help on diverse matters. She stated Wikipedia is going more professional and less self organized, which is good I in my opinion. And I personally thought her speech was more than optimistic, but passed the rightful idea on us, as Wikipedia users have a role to play and can actually help, by continually support it, which is by actually contribute to it, in information or in money donations.

For all I’ve heard in Florence presentation about the Wikipedia, the only real problem with it is that it effectively simply works!

Note: Bruno Giussani also posted some personal notes about this and Laurent, LIFT’s main organizer, posted the video from Florence presentation on LIFT, so just follow the links on their names to get the truth around this presentation.

É nestas situações que eu pessoalmente vejo o poder da web, neste caso foi devido a alguém mal informado que resolveu escrever sobre algo que claramente não presenciou nem entendeu. Já tinha em mente escrever as minhas notas sobre as apresentações da LIFT mais tarde ou mais cedo, mas como parece que surgiram alguns mal entendidos em relação à apresentação da Florence Devouard sobre o Futuro da Wikipedia, aproveito já para postar as notas que tirei da sua apresentação.

Florence, apresentou a Wikipedia como o mais importante exemplo de inovação on-line no que toca às ditas plataformas sociais, até aí nada de novo para ninguém, muito embora nunca seja demais de ouvir de novo. A verdade é que a Wikipedia é de facto o melhor e provavelmente também o mais usado exemplo de participação dos utilizadores, co-creação e partilha de conhecimento on-line até ao momento, que tanto ajudaram a cunhar o termo Web2.0, do qual eu particularmente não gosto e que acredito mais tarde ou mais cedo dará lugar ao termo Social Web, vamos ver…

Wikipedia é um ambiente comunitário, compreende hoje cerca de 250 linguagens, algumas das quais não possuem sequer correspondentes em papel. A Florence referiu ainda uma ideia por de trás das enciclopédias ou pelo menos como estas deveriam ser: “The idea behind encyclopedias should be radical”, a ideia de uma enciclopédia deve ser radical, deve deixar de ser segura, e sobre esse mote as vantagens para a wikipedia são claras: colecciona conhecimento localmente, para na verdade o fazer também globalmente, e ao contrário de muitas enciclopédias em papel, não apresenta somente os dados “autorizados” ou as visões generalistas de um dado facto, mas abre as portas a todas as partes interessadas num dado assunto, poderem escrever sobre as suas visões tipicamente diferentes de um mesmo assunto.

A Wikipedia hoje colecciona imensos quantidades de informação, o que acabar por se tornar num dos seus principais problemas, dos vários que a Florence abordou na sua apresentação. Mencionou o facto de a Wikipedia, ser uma inovação ou uma simpática utopia, cujo modelo adoptado até aqui pode não ser sustentável a longo prazo, que é nada mais nada menos do que o facto que escapou a alguns “acelerados” e “alarmistas” bloggers e que é na verdade muito diferente de ter dito que Wikipedia podia encerrar as portas nos próximos meses.

A Wikipedia é reactiva, no sentido de que não existem limites à partilha de conhecimento, e no sentido de que existe um imenso cuidado por parte dos utilizadores, colaboradores pela informação que é disponibilizada através da sua plataforma. A Wikipedia não se limita a cuidar das suas mentes criticas, mas também assume a sua missão como de um serviço de informação ao contrário de um serviço de manipulação. O vandalismo sobre as páginas da Wikipedia são factos mais ou menos conhecidos, mas também é aqui que surge o maior exemplo de vitalidade e reactividade da mesma, não só pelo seu tempo de resposta a essas situações, mas pelo facto de facilitar a cultura do {{REPARE VOÇÊ MESMO}} que fornece a cada utilizador a capacidade de reparar, ie, corrigir alguma falha que eventualmente encontre nos conteúdos disponibilizados pela Wikipedia. Poder ao utilizador, ao invés do anterior modelo de poder da organização, na verdade a Wikipedia opta em geral pela abertura da plataforma ao invés de limitar o acesso aos utilizadores.

A questão da sustentabilidade ou não da Wikipedia na apresentação da Florence, surgiu muito provavelmente depois da mesma ter apresentado algumas estatísticas e números por detrás desta enciclopédia online: no ínicio toda a Wikipedia estava alojada num único servidor, em 2004, passou a estar distribuída por 4 servidores, e actualmente compreende já um cluster de 350 servidores, 6 milhões de artigos e 50000 utilizadores registados. Os número falam por si, são impressionantes e revelam um problema inerente de escalabilidade para quem se interessa por essas coisas, ora apresentados os números e o problema de crescimento, o que a Florence realmente disse, para quem a ouviu ao vivo como eu foi que a Fundação que suporta a Wikipedia, têm neste momento em conta, pouco mais do que o montante correspondente ao necessário para pagar por pouco mais do que 3 meses, todos os custos inerentes a essa mesma plataforma, MAS, e é aqui que alguém se esqueceu, de referir, a mesma Florence afirmou que na equipa da Wikipedia, há quem esteja a projectar já o futuro da mesma, com objectivos definidos para dois anos no futuro, e afirmou inclusive que a ideia da Wikipedia fechar daqui a três meses é no mínimo catastrófica, não dizer mais. O pedido que a representante da Wikipedia formulou a seguir e que na minha visão das coisas fez todo o sentido, foi pedir a todos os presentes naquela sessão da LIFT que ajudassem a suportar a Wikipedia, uma vez que uma das maiores fontes de rendimento da Wikipedia, provém directamente das muitas doações que constantemente e todos os meses são enviados a respectiva fundação e que acabam por garantir a sua sustentabilidade mês após mês.

Durante a apresentação a Florence fez ainda questão de dar a conhecer, que a própria estrutura de suporte da Wikipedia está, e muito bem a sofrer grandes mudanças, sendo a mais visivel o que facto de já possuir empregados próprios, 10 no total que asseguram as muitas tarefas administrativas necessárias ao projecto. A sua afirmação foi no sentido da Wikipedia se estar a profissionalizar e a abandonar gradualmente o modelo de auto-organização que a protagonizou. Este facto, parece-me não só importante como muito provavelmente vital para a saúde do projecto. Em geral considerei a sua apresentação, longe de catastrófica, mas até bastante posititva, tendo passado uma importante mensagem a todos os presentes que foi o facto de que nós todos, enquanto utilizadores da Wikipedia temos, como que, a obrigação de a suportar, quer seja através das nossas contribuições em termos de informação, quer até mesmo as possíveis contribuições financeiras que possamos fazer, tudo conta, e tudo é importante!

A expressão mais dramática que ouvi em toda a apresentação da Florence foi de que o único problema realmente complicado da Wikipedia, é que o modelo ,realmente e, simplesmente funciona!

Nota: O Bruno Giussani também escreveu um post sobre o assunto, e o Laurent, o organizador principal da LIFT, publicou o vídeo da apresentação da Florence na LIFT, por isso e para eliminar qualquer dúvida, basta que sigam os links para saberem o que realmente se falou nesta apresentação.

1 comment February 13th, 2007