Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Eric Schmidt: Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle.

Jeff Bezos: “We make muck so you don’t have to.”

CNET News.com: “Google is targeting the neo-network computer, not Microsoft, with all the Web-based applications it is releasing, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Summit here Tuesday.”

Yahoo quietly released the del.icio.us Bookmarks Firefox extension the other day, which does something I’ve been wanting del.icio.us to do for a very long time, namely fully integrate with Firefox bookmarks.

Like a lot of people, I gave up long ago on using bookmarks to keep track of interesting sites (del.icio.us fills that role quite nicely for me now). Still, the process of bookmarking something in del.icio.us had always been a bit tedious. The old del.icio.us extension helped a little (it would prefill the Notes field with whatever text was currently selected), but it was still missing some pretty important functionality (the popup didn’t display your existing bookmarks like the bookmarklet did). And even with del.icio.us, I still used browser bookmarks for quick access to the sites I frequent most via the bookmarks toolbar.

The new extension integrates with browser bookmarks almost perfectly—with a few big exceptions. It’s easy to import your existing bookmarks (the extension even offers to give them a special tag and mark them “private” so as not to clutter your existing bookmarks, as well as mines existing tags to try to categorize what’s imported automatically). The tag button is much more functional now and offers to show your existing tags, my big complaint about the previous extension. And the new extension nicely replaces the bookmarks toolbar and allows you to specify and even order your favorite tags, effectively replacing the last useful vestiges of browser bookmarks with a del.icio.us backed equivalent that also allows you to give other tags to those bookmarks.

That said, there are some pretty significant problems with the new extension, the biggest in my view being that there’s no way to change the sort order of the bookmarks within your favorite tags. Essentially, this makes the bookmarks toolbar far less useful—selecting “apps”, which used to contain a manually sorted list of web applications I frequently use, now contains a list of bookmarks in seemingly random order (it’s actually reverse chronological, but that’s not particularly useful for the bookmarks toolbar). The tags submenu under bookmarks doesn’t have any hierarchy to it—all tags are at the top level, making getting to a tag later in the alphabet quite tedious (I’d rather see a “tags starting with a”, “tags starting with b”, etc. structure). And, at least in my early experimentation, synchronization doesn’t always work as expected—changes to my local bookmarks seem to propagate back to del.icio.us, but the reverse doesn’t always seem to be true.

Still, it’s a promising start, and I’m going to keep using it. If they don’t fix the sort problem soon, though, I’ll likely revert to Google Browser Sync. (Interestingly, Google Browser Sync is listed as incompatible and is disabled on installation of the del.icio.us extension, even though it technically does other things, like synchronize cookies and passwords. This would seem to be a smart move on Yahoo’s part—challenge Google’s foothold in the browser and create a foothold of its own.)

A few parting thoughts: I’ve only installed this extension on my laptop thus far, and it’ll be interesting to see how well synchronization of my bookmarks works across machines (will it synchronize my favorite tags etc., allowing me to maintain a consistent browser toolbar? etc.). Finally, I’d like to see the “tag” function better integrated with the browser, perhaps the way Flock does it (a Google like star next to the address bar that reflects the current site’s del.icio.us state).

John Milan: “The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren’t the only players in town, not by a long shot.”

Jeff Licquia: “Ian has been filling my head with tantalizing visions of replacing my hosted boxes with online apps. I think I’m going to give some of these a spin, but I’m not convinced yet. It seems to me that the lesson to learn–don’t put all your eggs in one basket–argues equally well either way.”

I’ve long wondered what the point of the “Work Offline” option in Firefox is (it’s in the “File” menu). All it really seems to do is take you to a helpful (cough) error screen when you’re working offline that tells you you can’t view the page you’re trying to view till you’re online again. If the page is in the cache, it’ll display it, but that seems to happen only rarely. I jacked my cache up to 4GB, but much to my surprise, that doesn’t appear to result in a noticeably higher cache hit rate.

IE has a similar option, but it actually does something. In fact, it’s quite slick. When you add a page as a favorite, you’re given a “Make available offline” option. Once that option is selected, you can click “Customize…”, which launches a wizard that allows you to mark other pages the favorite links to as available offline as well (useful for sites like Slashdot that primarily link to other sites). You can also specify when the page(s) should be synchronized (manually or on a predefined schedule, such as every day at 5am).

The Blackberry browser has a similar option too, though I haven’t used it much (most of my offline time tends to be on airplanes, and I’d much rather view the web on my laptop). The Blackberry does have a neat feature IE doesn’t have though, which is if you try to load a page that isn’t available offline, it’ll offer to queue up the request and download it once you’re online again. As with everything on the Blackberry, the page will show up in the universal inbox along with email, SMS, missed calls, etc. No more trying to remember what pages you wanted to load when you were offline or resorting to tricks only a hacker could love. Imagining a feature like this integrated with a Gmail/Google Reader combo that supports offline operation makes my mouth water.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I’ve never actually gotten around to writing about it. What inspired me to do that today? Scrybe, an amazing online productivity suite that has a variety of unique and killer features, including excellent use of AJAX to preserve context as you move around within the application, a novel approach to scheduling across timezones, full integration between the calendar and to-do lists (why don’t more calendar applications do this?), and more. Watch the video for yourself.

The most interesting feature from my point of view, though, is the offline support: Simply select “Work Offline”, and everything works, well, offline, no browser extension required. It even appears that changes will be synchronized when you’re online again (i.e., it’s not just a read only copy). The beta isn’t publicly available yet, but I can’t wait to see how they did this. My prediction: If this works as well as it looks, all web applications will eventually work this way. And it’s good to see that some companies are thinking about the offline problem, rather than just assuming ubiquitous Internet connectivity makes the problem go away in the very near future.

Mihai Parparita: “You may wonder why I felt the need to write a Greasemonkey script for my own product. The answer is that integrations are hard and generally require a lot of effort before you can even determine if they are worthwhile. Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary from either team (I had to make exactly one change to [Google] Reader to better support this script, and that was the ability to force list view to be used, even if expanded view is normally selected).”

David Berlind: “Perhaps the best solution I’ve seen that does roughly the same thing and that makes synchronization between the local and network-based storage (and just requires a low-overhead local HTTP server) is Userland’s Radio blogging solution (credit to Dave Winer). More and more, solution providers will recognize the genius in that design as they look to deal with the offline problem as elegantly as possible given today’s constraints.”

The following phrase jumped out at me from a post Rafe Needleman made earlier today about Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

Google is going to “take a shot” at a disconnected version, for users who want to access files when they are offline.

While I was digging around trying to figure out where he got this, Garett Rogers posted his own discovery:

As you probably know, I really like to dig through source code — and sometimes I find things. […] I will start with the most interesting piece of code I found. Google is working on a solution that will allow you to install Writely on your local machine:

    if (location.host.indexOf("localhost") > -1)
    {
      if (location.host.indexOf("Prefactor") > -1)
        return "http://localhost:8180/Prefactor/" + page + paramString;
      else
        return "http://localhost:8180/Docster/" + page + paramString;
    } else
      return "http://" + location.host + "/" + page + paramString;

This is absolutely huge news. Regular readers of my blog know that I view Google’s lack of an offline story (in all but a few areas anyway) as its biggest hole, particularly when stacked against Microsoft, where that’s arguably its greatest strength. So, the fact that Google is working on this is big news is itself.

I’m also intrigued by the method they’re apparently using, namely a localhost web server, rather than a thick client or persistent storage via a browser extension. I’ve been thinking for a long time about the offline problem, and I’ve come to the conclusion that localhost web servers (which I first saw used to great effect in Radio Userland—credit where credit is due) are the ideal solution.

Thick clients play to Microsoft’s strength (not to mention the OS issue), so that’s not the best approach. And the notion of adding persistent storage to the browser opens up a host of cross browser compatibility problems. And while it may be possible to come up with a standard API that works across Firefox, IE, and other browsers, such a standard is likely years away, particularly given that we haven’t even begun the “competing implementations battle it out” phase yet.