Status Que

What is Wave?

Google Wave is in beta as a form of hosted communications. A topic can have ongoing entries from contacts who attach messages, pictures, videos, maps and files. Email-like search is enabled. It can reportedly be embedded into other web pages or blogs. There are extensions for conferencing and interfaces to social networks such as twitter.

It has been said that users have profiles and organizations have pages, at least as far as Facebook and LinkedIn are concerned. A difference from Twitter is that there does not yet seem to be public visibility which is also similar to web2.0 features of O’Reilly Safari books online.

Test Information Space has multiple components including profiles, bookmarks, Q&A, blogs, wiki, notes, files, multimedia and socnets.

Some measures might include:

How is usability?

Does it improve accessibility, e.g. realtime and mobile?

How can blips be categorized?

Does it handle feeds?

How can streams be filtered?

What mashups are useful?

How can dashboards be applied?

What level of discovery is there, e.g. for relevant contacts or recommendations?

What is support for analytics and datamining?

Is the perspective top-down, bottom-up, inside-out, all-at-once, or yet another mask?

Adding contact Bloggy, blog-wave@appspot.com, should publish. It was not activated on the preview version yet.

Reference: Getting Started with Google Wave Ferrate 2009.

Links: wave

DataWareHows

Test categories can be expanded to deal with the new dimensions of online knowledge. As the consequences of errors go up, risk increases. Devices can be reset to restore operations, but this is not as easy for entire networks or groups. Separate levels of representation introduce probability of discrepancies between physical, data and metadata levels. This occurs for example in government, security, or medical databases. Accuracy and analysis at the new scales of storage and transactions are expected to occur in real-time to support services. Stability is usually provided by vendor alliances or regulatory agencies which fund the generation of standards, yet practices are being objectively reviewed for likely survivability in current economic phase. Social requirements sometimes seem to result in a “lunatic fringe” which simultaneously contradicts accepted rules yet may provide solutions which can be adapted to more general cases. News about what works spreads through novel applications of media. Testing and engineering basics may be picked up by users earlier in their experience and systems can be more self-repairing. Eventually some form of this finds its way into the hardware and materials so that people can attend to the matters that are important to them and knowledge interacts at more primitive levels. Hopefully, this can be extended to wider orbits.

Incidentally, in case of artistic inspiration, Aviary can be used as online graphic editor, e.g. for avatars.

Readings: Sanderson 2009 on Google AE in progress, Rubin 2008 usability, Cooper 2008 GWT, Thatcher 2006 accessibility, and Shlain 2009 medical.

Image: Moon occults Saturn.

Social Weave

Email forms a primary social network according to Jeremiah Owyang. Since more functionality seems to be needed, custom scripts would be appropriate. Asked LinkedIn about practices and it echoed warnings of impending Google Wave. Upcoming open-source cross-browser extensions and API will take advantage of built-in media and contact handling, e.g. using HTML5. It is reportedly coded using Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which is also discussed in  Hanson and Tacy 2007.

Other wiki additions included Croll 2009 on performance, Hurley 2007 on security.

Can use HTTrack to copy web site content. Parts of Test Info Space can be downloaded into a project for off-line review.

A web service can be run directly from a device using Opera Unite for browser-based collaboration which includes darknets.

Twitter beached the fail whale and graduated from recent celebrity status to geopolitical journalism concerning Iran election. There may be more exceptions in the midst.

Final Term

Answer engines indicate uptick, e.g. Wolfram Alpha or IBM DeepQA to augment expertise.

Search now yields Google profile. Added a site to Ning which features social networking, pictures and videos.

Recent reading list composed of Nilekani 2009 on future of India and IT, Ash 2008 web performance, Weilkiens 2008 SysML and UML, Andrews 2006 testing web security, and Beck 2002 about test-driven development.

Twine upgraded to Sprint 36. UI looks more like feed reader sorted by topics which can be ordered by preference. Each twine’s view indicates items that have not been read yet and can be sorted by type (e.g. all, bookmark or comment). Authors are not obvious so dialogue swarms seem to be less frequent. Can bookmark or subscribe to feeds of particular twines or members to follow, or pipe to Twitter or its newly imitative complements, Facebook and Friendfeed.

ComboFix security was useful to cleanup self-reinstalling adware processes.

Image: Dr. Eldon Tyrell

Subtle UIs

There is a common logic behind various website designs such as Google, Amazon and Imdb. The goals are to achieve clarity and make the user’s life easier. Navigation and search are key. They reinforce the user’s ability to quckly get the idea and complete the task. The site ID, home page, search, sections and utilities are easily found. This is the thesis of Don’t Make Me Think, Krug, 2005, a popular book about empirical web usability testing. Wikis are another aspect of this quickness approach. Also see author’s site and additional resources.

Gently Down the Stream

Due to the growth of social networking, recently added more resources under twitter and rss tags.

Friendfeed followers may have noticed expansion of feed circuit to Twine from delicious via rssforward. The latter is needed since onlywire has a limited set of sites that it can post to, and Twine does not have a built-in feed input to complement its output subscriptions. Zigtag has a delicious import function given login settings or external bookmark file and sends an email when completed.

Published this site to feedburner. Started reviewing Toluu blog feeds which easily connected to google reader.

Easing the Feed Speed Limit

Onlywire simultaneously posts bookmarks to multiple sites, e.g. del.icio.us, twitter, furl, or connotea. An icon can be added to the browser toolbar that prompts for tags and comment. They request that it be promoted on the user site using a javascript command, e.g. googlepages.

There are things yet to be done. Some sites were not available, e.g. zigtag, twine or buru, and it seemed to have difficulty with blinklist and simpy. The site promotion was not immediately activated using html widgets on wordpress or office live. The onlywire bookmark list did not seem to include all recent links though they had appeared on target sites. Use of the browser button sometimes lands on a blank page labelled “Bookmark Saved” rather than returning to the original page. Had not yet tested the API to allow applications to automatically bookmark. It would be nice to have an RSS feed of bookmarks from the site, e.g. to use in friendfeed, though the latter does input from some of the individual sites.

Incidentally, LinkedIn blog feed app can post entries on one’s full profile. Blog posts to Twitter can use Twitterfeed.

Read Google Web Toolkit Applications, Ryan Dewsbury, 2007, 608pp. Author video. Blog. Related videos. Source.

Installed Chrome browser. Google maintains minimalist interface using “one box for everything”, this time for the browser address rather than for search terms. It has tabs and opens a new one displaying snapshots of favorite pages. It has a built-in task manager to Was able to import setting from Firefox on startup. Microsoft Office Live did not recognize browser type to allow login as happened for Flock or recent IE8 release also; FF3 is okay there. Zigtag bookmarklet was able to be dragged to bookmark bar; runs somewhat slower than the sidebar in Mozilla, and equivalent to Twine beta bookmarklet.

Test Information Space expanded from youtest to acm and teki to test recently released Google Sites.

“The Rails Way”, 2007, Fernandez, 912pp describes some advanced practices. Ruby documentation discusses language. InstantRails has downloadable development system for Windows. Heroku has server.

“Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models“, Bergeron, 2000 has in-depth analysis of verification and behavioral modelling among other topics.