Blogs

I was lucky enough to be one of a small group of people invited along to Google's London offices last Friday for a breakfast briefing. This was right after Thursday's announcement of OpenSocial. We didn't know for sure what was going to be covered, but a combination of leaks and educated guesses meant that most people had figured out that we were going to get more than just a free breakfast.

As I'm sure you know by now, OpenSocial is a social-networking application development API created by Google that is being implemented by pretty much all social networking sites (with the notable exception of Facebook). You can now write applications that will work without modification on MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, hi5, salesforce.com, and many more. The only social networking site that is not likely to appear in this list any time soon is Facebook, and that's an obvious consequence of Microsoft's recent $240m investment. But even Facebook might have to kowtow to OpenSocial in the long run.

The OpenSocial API gives you the ability to write social-networking applications that can be hosted on any site that supports the API. This "learn once, run anywhere" capability makes it easy to develop functionality that can be used by a combined audience of over 150 million users. This is a one-click reach that puts your application right on the user's home page with no clumsy client-side installation or fiddly account registration to go through.

Suddenly this is the new application development platform kid on the block. At the moment it is billed as a social-networking platform, but from what I've seen there's no impediment to writing any kind of application using the OpenSocial API. Google have chosen to leverage HTML, JavaScript and Ajax, all of which are open and ubiquitous, to create a very rich and flexible platform. By contrast Facebook's platform (FBML), launched a few months ago, is idiomatic, closed and proprietary.

You can now build full function applications that can run inside each of your user's chosen social networking site. No longer do you need to ask users to navigate to your web-site, lead them through tortuous registration and login procedures to a site with its own idiosyncratic behaviour and UI. Just get them to add your application to their own MySpace, Ning or Orkut page. Whether your goal is to provide financial information, retailing, patient appointment booking or any other kind of customer facing service, you can now bring it to them rather than requiring them to come to you. You can have your application right in front of them, logged-on and authenticated whenever and wherever they're on-line. Why would you want to make it any harder than that for your users to run your application?

It's early days and the dust has yet to settle, but it could be that what Google have unleashed here is not just a social-networking platform but something that could grow to become the platform for all application development.

Today Google OS means Google OpenSocial, but sometime in the future it might just mean Google Operating System.

Well I announced it in my Lightning talk at the conference. The Amazon S3 Client
for Caché is now finished and available from http://www.mgateway.com.

Here's the notes from the web site:

This application provides a Caché-based web interface to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) which
offers very low-cost, secure online data storage on Amazon's infrastructure. You can use Amazon S3 for
private storage of data (eg for low-cost backup) or for making data and/or files publicly available at an
incredibly low cost.

You can use the pre-built, Ajax-based client interface to manage and maintain your Amazon S3 storage.

Alternatively you can also use the same low-level Caché API methods that were used to create
the pre-built client interface. These APIs allow you to quickly and simply build your own application
interfaces and to integrate Amazon S3 storage with your Caché applications. The M/Gateway S3 APIs make it
possible to use Amazon S3 storage as an extension to Caché's database storage.

Amazon S3 is VERY cool, and incredibly cheap. Check it out and try out our interface!

Here's something interesting that I stumbled across today: Bug Labs.

A BUG is a sort-of DIY modular computing device. At its core is BUGbase which is a small form-factor Linux box with a number of connectors and a tripod mount(!). You can then just plug together any number of modules: accelerometer, Camera, GPS, keyboard, etc, add a little bit of software and make the portable device of your dreams.

As they say: "For example, with BUG, you can easily assemble and program a GPS + digital camera device that automatically publishes geo-tagged photos as a web service. Integrating with an online photo-sharing service like Flickr is only a few more lines of code away, and now you have your own real-time, connected traffic-enabled mobile Webcam!"

The BUG appears to be aimed at the "long tail" of gadgets. Those niches that are too small to be viable for the mass produced, purpose build, consumer electronics industry. I wonder what kind of ideas people will come up with for a device like this. Any suggestions?

It's very interesting to see the number of views that our respective presentations have now clocked up at Slideshare. For example, mine stands today at over 390 and George's an amazing 470. Even taking into account that many of the viewers will have been "tyre kickers", it's still an amazing way of getting your message out to many more people than you'd otherwise have reached in a conference alone.

I'm sure that many of the views will have been by members of the Cache/MUMPS community, but I'm also sure that we've managed to increase awareness of these technologies for quite a few new people - an objective we always had for this conference.

Maybe our next conference doesn't need to be a physical one, just a set of Powerpoint slidecasts on Slideshare! ;-)