Laughing Meme » mozilla

Raindrop, this mornings coffee shop conversation with my imaginary friend

Kellan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:13:50 +0000

I’m not really qualified to write or say anything about Raindrop, Aaron pointed it out to me yesterday, and I immediately got bogged in the marketing speak on the page. Still, I was sitting at El Beit this morning thinking that if El Beit was Ritual I could have struck up a conversation with person sitting next to me, and we could have had a conversation about our mutual inability to get past the marketing speak, and besides this whole “qualified” filter is a tension largely created by the professional blogging class, who are frankly boring as a sin, every last one of them.

So, once I got done talking (very very quietly) about how Raindrop sounds awesome, but also kind Chandler-ishly vague, I saw this Twitter from Sonny, “Raindrop is the innovative idea that Google Wave was hoping to be.”

Which got me all kinds of excited again. And also musing on the failures of Wave. Really hoping that Raindrop can be useful to me, whether or not you’re also using it, Google is qualified to build boil the sea solutions, but they lack elegances.

Just the name Raindrop sort of sounds to me like something that could build slowly to a crescendo, a “delicious play”: a tool useful long before its adoption curve cross the plane where its latent social dimension is revealed. (my imaginary friend is old school, he pointed out that IM tools successfully required people to opt-in to build value and they’ve done fairly well, to which I can only say times were simpler when ICQ was launched and we were all more desperate for better tools, and AOL already had a meaningful desktop internet install base they could upgrade largely in place)

And then Raindrop has all this buzz about personal/people centricity, but I’m worried not to see much acknowledgement on the failure of RSS readers. Its easy to get confused by the real time web buzz and think people actually want real time, comprehensive information. Fuck that. I want a tool that delivers meaningful, timely information, everything else is just anxiety producing.

Blaine has done a lot of good thinking, and talking, and not nearly enough good writing on the game changing, sea change that is the switch from pull-to-push, that perhaps the white-list vs black-list is the most important kladistic trait, and I’m wondering if papering over those divides in a single client misses the point. (Blaine useful refers to this as, “the total fucking brokenness which is email” or words to that effect) It’s something I’ve been meditating on a late into the night recently having just opened a new push communication channel on Flickr.

“Raindrop uses a mini web server” is also old school. Wow. There was a really wild and wooly bunch of apps being evolved at the end of the 20th century that largely died out, interesting to see that design idea still kicking out interesting creatures. (this is what Aaron calls the I-hate-to-admit-it-but-Dave-Winer-was-right principle)

And while I love to see Flickr get love, “flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message”, it really raises the question in a system of social object sharing, what is the object? Just the photo? Something else? (and smacks a bit of the one-system-to-rule them all, which is cool, but again, see Chandler, and Dreaming in Code)

What can I say, that’s the sort of thing my imaginary friend and I talk about. Now I guess I should go finish reading those docs.

Congrats to the Google Gears team!

Kellan — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:40:35 +0000

That must have been a long road — if you look around you can find traces of development leading back to 2005.

http://gears.google.com/

SQLite now has full text indexing, as a loadable module.

Kellan — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 06:42:00 +0000

The embedded database of choice just got more interesting. What would you do with an embedded , searchable database in Firefox? (via)

http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=FtsOne

I’m sure Boris Zbarsky is a wonderful person

Kellan — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:25:00 +0000

But could someone maybe distract him long enough (a night on the town?) to get the damn phantom text nodes in Firefox fixed?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26179

Apparently Moz embeds a SQLite data store.

Kellan — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 20:58:00 +0000

Who knew? (besides Phil of course)

http://www.sauria.com/blog/computers/open_source/asf/1440#1134520345.71

“it’s kind of fitting that one of the few startups in silicon valley to immediately go cash positive is a non-profit;”

Kellan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 01:12:00 +0000

Firefox is making $30mil off of its Google search box. (old news I guess, but first I’ve heard it.)

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2005/05/firefox_foxy_ca.html

Bug 26179 – Mozilla reports existence of phantom text nodes in the DOM

Kellan — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 08:51:00 +0000

this bug has been open for 4 years, and it makes a good chunk of the DOM useless

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26179

10 years? Seems like only yesterday we were all using Mosaic

Kellan — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 08:44:02 +0000

Oct 13th, 2004 – Tenth Anniversary of First Netscape Public Beta

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=5384

Even Firefox has security problems…. if you run it on Windows.

Kellan — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 12:54:28 +0000

Similarly we only know how to circumvent FairPlay on Windows.

http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/08/2159244.shtml?tid=126&tid=128&tid=154&tid=172&tid=95

javascript:window.resizeTo(640,480)

Kellan — Mon, 03 May 2004 21:33:13 +0000

for when Windows insists on hiding the window resize controls type this into the location bar.

javascript:window.resizeTo(640,480)

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 is out, and works great.

Kellan — Mon, 03 May 2004 21:27:11 +0000

Though I’d like to see then think more about their threading support, ala Gmail

http://mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/