Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Google Reader relaunched a few weeks ago, and for the first time since my initial foray into blogging with Radio Userland in 2003, I’m actually enjoying using an RSS reader.

Why? River of news. Most feed readers inexplicably model the email workflow, presenting feeds like folders and feed items like messages. Given the state of most peoples’ inboxes, why on earth would you model email when you’re writing one of these things?

Google Reader does river of news right. Simply click on “All items” and scroll through the items with the mouse wheel, clicking on the interesting stories (or reading them inline when the feed is full text). Google Reader takes care of marking the items read as they scroll past. Automatically.

The praise doesn’t stop there. There are handy keyboard shortcuts (”n” for next item, “r” to refresh, etc.). Performance is excellent, as feed items are loaded on demand using AJAXy techniques. The look and feel is clean and simple, reminiscent of Gmail, down to easy to read timestamps like “9:53 AM (7 minutes ago)”; and, also like Gmail, there’s a mobile version.

Intriguingly, you can sort by “auto” in addition to by newest, which presumably applies some sort of relevance algorithm to the feed items. However, it isn’t clear how it determines relevance (does it track my clicks as I scroll through the feeds, examine my broader search history, what?).

Google Reader is a good platform citizen too. There’s a gadget you can add to your personalized Google home page, and gadgets, in case you missed it, are becoming full fledged web components as of last week. Oh, there’s an API too.

Finally, in concert with Mozilla Firefox 2, subscribing to feeds finally no longer involves configuring a bookmarklet or, worse, the complex gymnastics of right click/copy link location/go to the appropriate URL/paste/subscribe. With Firefox 2, you can configure the feed subscriber to use Google Reader. As a result, you can now click on the feed icon in the address bar to subscribe to the site’s feed. In most cases, you can even click on a link to an RSS/Atom feed, for those sites that don’t have autodiscovery configured properly. My only complaint here is that it doesn’t remember that I want to subscribe in Google Reader; rather, it asks whether I want to “Add to Google Homepage” or “Add to Google Reader” every time. Ideally, it would show me a preview of the feed instead. I’ve seen Google Reader do that before, so perhaps it’s just a matter of configuring it to go to a different URL, though I’m not sure how to do that.

So, what’s not to like here? As with most Google products, it’s not particularly well integrated with the Google platform. Indeed, in that particular post, I complained that there were three different ways of creating a bookmark in the Google platform. Well, there now appear to be four. If all of these mechanisms were integrated, that would be enormously powerful. See something interesting in the Google Reader? Click on the star and, optionally, add tags. See something interesting on the search results page? Ditto. See something interesting on a random webpage? Pull down a menu on the Google Toolbar and do the same thing that way. Want to add free form notes to any of the above bookmarks? Pop into Google Notebook. Naturally, all of these actions should result in the bookmarks/tags/notes/etc. being added to a single stream that can be shared with other users, with all of the resulting social network functionality. Etc. etc. etc.

Sigh. I guess I have to be patient a little bit longer. Fortunately, Google sees the problem and is finally doing something about it.

Los Angeles Times: “[Google’s] top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.”

Excellent.

EFF: “Microsoft’s Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or ‘rented’ from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service. That’s right — the media that Microsoft promised would Play For Sure doesn’t even play on Microsoft’s own device…”

Wil Wheaton: “[W]hen the wisdom of the masses becomes the tyranny of the mob, it reflects rather poorly on all of us.”

I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer. It’s pretty incredible—setup was easy, and there’s a mode for editing the entry such that it looks exactly as it will look after it’s posted (i.e., with the right font, layout, etc.), though without all the page adornments (header graphic, sidebars, etc.). There is a preview mode for that though—if you could edit in the preview mode, now that would be incredible (better still, if you could edit the page directly, inline, presuming you had the appropriate credentials—a truly writable web!).

It’s too bad this is Windows only—I have a Windows box in my office, but it’s a desktop machine, so I don’t have it when I travel (I wonder if it will run under Wine?). I’d also love to see this integrated with Firefox, something like Performancing, where you can select some text, then right click “Blog This”. There is an IE toolbar, but that doesn’t help me.

In addition to being a nice tool, this does give a glimpse into Microsoft’s strategy for the web: Desktop/thick client apps as an extension to web/thin client apps, providing all the advantages of web apps but better UI, better performance, and offline support. So far, I like what I see.

I often quote Marc Andreessen’s 1995 comment that Netscape would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” when talking about Linux on the desktop—namely, that with applications increasingly moving to the web, it matters less whether Windows is on your desktop, because all you need to run your apps is a browser. The assumption here is if you no longer need Windows to run your apps, you’d run Linux, either because of the freedom of choice it gives you, or simply because it doesn’t cost $200 (take your pick there).

Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the operating system is just a set of device drivers, wouldn’t you want the most extensive set? As far as Linux on the desktop has come in the past few years, it still lags Windows significantly in plug-and-play value. For example, during my recent trip to Moscow, my Windows-running colleagues hopped onto wireless networks with impunity, both at the hotel and even sitting in taxis in the infamous Moscow traffic. While they were clicking on nice little balloons saying “wireless network detected”, I was learning more than I ever wanted to know about iwconfig, cursing all the while. And it’s not just wifi. My laptop only successfully suspends about the half the time. For whatever reason, the 3D acceleration on my laptop doesn’t work with the latest eye candy. And so on..

Me, I actually prefer the Linux desktop over Windows. But now, with all the improvements in virtualization over the past few years, I can still use the Linux desktop as my primary UI and have access to the most extensive set of device drivers. For the cheapskates among us, cost really isn’t an issue either—VMware Player and VMware Server are now available for free, and who doesn’t have at least five Windows licenses sitting around that they aren’t using? Besides, who wouldn’t pay a measly $200 to get Linux perfectly working with their laptop hardware?

Food for thought. Let the flames begin..

Tim Bray: “Apt-get is just so unreasonably fucking great. Why aren’t we using it for Solaris updates?”

Tim O’Reilly: “[I]t’s clear to me at least that the open source activist community needs to come to grips with the change in the way a great deal of software is deployed today. And that, after all, was my message: not that open source licenses are unnecessary, but that because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about software above the level of a single device lately, so I set out this weekend to finally get two-way email synchronization working on my Blackberry.

My main goal is to have a single inbox I can access from multiple devices without having to ever deal with the same message twice (i.e., if the message is read/filed/deleted/etc. on one client, it’s marked read/filed/deleted/etc. on all clients), with full support for disconnected operation. (I care much less about the oft ballyhooed push email feature—I’m perfectly content to wait 15-20 minutes for email to be delivered.)

Since what I want more or less perfectly describes IMAP, I figured Blackberry Internet Service, which uses standard Internet protocols for mail delivery and supports IMAP, would be sufficient, and that I wouldn’t need Blackberry Enterprise Server, which hooks into Exchange and other “enterprise” messaging systems.

Unfortunately, I appear to have been wrong. While messages read and deleted on the Blackberry are reflected on the IMAP server, the reverse is, surprisingly, not true (surprisingly because, unlike POP, which behaves similarly in BIS, IMAP is a bidirectional protocol).

In other words, when messages are read or deleted on another client (e.g., the Thunderbird running on my laptop), those changes aren’t reflected on the Blackberry; so, as a result, the Blackberry accumulates every message I receive when it’s not in use, making a periodic “Delete Prior” necessary to get rid of all the accumulated junk (which obviously deletes the useful messages too, like, ahem, the ones with my flight information in it).

Worst of all, after several days of trying to figure out why IMAP wasn’t working the way I was expecting it to, I discovered this is the expected behavior (see note 5—”Messages deleted from the source mailbox are not automatically deleted from the device”), rather than a bug.

What to do? I could obviously break down and upgrade to Blackberry Enterprise Server. I’m not too keen on setting up an Exchange server just for this (which would cost hundreds of dollars, particularly after the cascading upgrades typical of Microsoft products, e.g., I’d need to get Windows Server too).

As an alternative, there appear to be a number of companies that offer a BES hosting service. However, the costs add up pretty quickly—another $10/mo. to T-Mobile to allow BES traffic through (the “business tax”), $10/mo. for BES hosting, and $10-15/mo. for Exchange hosting on top of that (BES hosting is an add-on to Exchange hosting in every plan I’ve seen). That’s a grand total of $35/mo. just to get email marked read or deleted on my Blackberry when I read or delete it in Thunderbird. Hrmmph.

Another idea is to find a Blackberry IMAP client, but there seem to be a dearth of these. The main one that comes up both in web searches and that’s described in Blackberry Hacks is from a company called Reqwireless which, tantalizingly, was acquired by Google last year but whose products, frustratingly, are no longer available. In any event, I want something that integrates with the Blackberry’s excellent inbox, which aggregates email, SMS, missed calls, Google Talk messages, etc. in a single stream, and I’m not sure if a separate IMAP client will be able to do that.

Other observations:

This page says that “two-way [Blackberry] sync is coming soon” to Yahoo Mail. However, “coming soon” doesn’t really help me.

Funambol looks very promising, but it’s going to take me a little while to wrap my head around what exactly I need to do to deploy it. Not exactly point and click.

Scalix offers Scalix Wireless Solution that works with Blackberry and is integrated with the Enterprise and Small Business Editions. At $60/user with no minimum number of users and a free trial, this looks promising too.

Zimbra offers Zimbra Mobile, which “includes the ability to leverage Zimbra’s third party mobile partners that offer two-way sync to Blackberry and other devices” (whatever that means). However, I’m assuming this comes bundled with the Network Edition, which is sold with a minimum of 25 users, and that probably makes it unaffordable to an individual user like me.

Any other suggestions?

More Cote’: “What most desktop applications lack now-a-days are features that are fully web-enabled, in a bi-directional sense.”

Exactly. And “fully web-enabled, in a bi-directional sense” needs to extend to the mobile device as well. Software above the level of a single device may be a key tenet of Web 2.0, but current Web 2.0 applications are doing an absolutely miserable job of fulfilling it. We need to get synchronization right (with full support for disconnected operation!) before this new platform can truly replace the fat client, though as I’ve said before, I see the new platform as more of an extension to the fat client than as a replacement for it. Trust me. I was just in Moscow for nearly a week without reliable Internet access. I don’t care how nice Gmail is, it was utterly useless to me sitting there in my hotel room trying to get the finicky WiFi to work. Guess what? I’m back on Thunderbird now, even though I like Gmail better. (No, POP doesn’t count as “web-enabled, in a bi-directional sense.”)