justflogme

In a recent story about how Google creatively destroys markets, I said that only Google will run the servers for Wave, its re-think of e-mail. I was wrong about that, as Google reps took pains to tell me. I want to set the record straight. What Google is doing with the Wave communications architecture is important enough that it merits its own story, not just a strikeout in the original.

Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. The Internet routes messages from server to server.

In contrast, only Google runs the Gmail servers.

I was told that anyone will be able to "build their own Wave server without involvement from Google." That means corporations and governments will be able to deploy their own instances of Wave inside their secure firewalls if they like, and decide how or if they want to open up their servers to the outside world. For businesses with strict data retention and auditing requirements (e.g., all public companies, governmental agencies, health care businesses, etc.), this also means that they'll be able to write in software to meet their needs; or that other companies will be able to create and sell Wave servers. (If, that is, business gets behind Wave at all.)

However, sources familiar with the intricacies of building a real-time synchronization engine, which is what Wave is, tell me that it is incredibly challenging to make such a system work "at scale." Showing off a Wave demo is one thing. But a successful, well-performing, wide-scale rollout requires advanced technology that few companies have the chops to write, and it's hard to keep performance up as the size of the user community grows. This may be why the original planned release of Wave to developers outside Google has been delayed by several days.

Wave will be based on (and extend on) the existing messaging standard, XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). So a lot of Web developers will be able to get started quickly on writing Wave extensions and apps, as well as building their own servers to run Wave or back-end services for their Wave plug-ins.

Wave may represent new thinking about packaging real-time communication, but it's not based on 100 percent new or proprietary technology, so we might see some interesting third-party extensions to Wave very shortly after it starts rolling out to the public.

I stand by the rest of my story, especially my main thesis: Google destroys entrenched markets. That's not a bad thing, though. Especially when it comes to e-mail.

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Microsoft confirmed on Friday that, with Windows 7, it will lift the limitation that the entry-level "Starter Edition" run no more than three applications at a time.

With Windows 7, Microsoft is for the first time allowing the product to be used globally, as opposed to just in emerging markets. ...

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After almost two years without providing any support, Yahoo has finally decided to shut down its blog-centric social Web site Yahoo 360 Degrees completely on July 13. During its more than four years of existence, the site has never actually been out of the beta stage.

In an e-mail to its members, the company said, "We will be officially closing Yahoo 360 on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360 information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo 360 will no longer be accessible."

Yahoo 360 was launched in March 2005. The site never became big in the United States and in October 2007, Yahoo decided to stop providing support for it.

However, in other countries, especially Vietnam, the site has been the most popular blogging portal. For this reason, Vietnamese users can migrate their Yahoo 360 content to Yahoo 360Plus, a product specifically made for the Vietnamese market that the company announced a year ago.

Last August, Yahoo also shut down Mash, which was another failed attempt into social Web sites.

This is sad news for thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide, since for a lot of them the blogs posted on Yahoo 360 and the friends they have there are part of their lives. Yahoo recommends that Yahoo 360 users immediately move their blogs to their current Yahoo profile to save them and download their contacts onto a computer. There are also options to migrate blogs to other blogging sites.

You can find out more information on how to do that here.

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Mozilla is close to releasing of its near-final version of Firefox 3.5, but the updated browser wasn't quite ready in time for a planned day of widespread testing.

Earlier this month, Mozilla set Friday to be Firefox 3.5 RC1 Test Day. But RC1, the first release candidate designed to be more stable than the earlier Firefox beta versions, wasn't finished for the occasion.

"Even though RC1 hasn't been released yet, the test day will still go on with the latest nightlies (nightly builds of Firefox based on the latest source code) which are practically RC1 minus some minor uplifts," said Aakash Desai of Mozilla's quality assurance team on Thursday. Mozilla has set up the Litmus program to encourage broad testing of its software.

RC1 is expected in a few weeks, spokeswoman Melissa Shapiro said Friday, though one developer told CNET News he hoped it would arrive in less than two.

The new version of Firefox began as version 3.1, a modest update. But a gradually expanding feature list led Mozilla to rename it 3.5 and release it months later than had been planned initially. In the meantime, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, Apple released a beta of Safari 4, and Google has released a rolling series of upgrades to its new Chrome browser.

Among the changes compared with the current Firefox 3.0.x versions are the faster TraceMonkey engine for running Web sites' JavaScript programs; support for tags to describe audio and video content the way images have been available for years; the private browsing mode for leaving no traces on your computer while surfing; support for geolocation technology to let permitted applications know the user's location; built-in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) technology for exchanging data between servers and browsers; and support for the Web Workers standard for letting a browser perform processing in the background without holding back a Web application's user interface.

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Tag parser: Error processing tag 'slideshow'. java.lang.NullPointerException

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For those who are having a little trouble understanding exactly what Google Wave is all about, seeing it in action might help you wrap your head around the concept.

Google has released video of Thursday's keynote speech at Google I/O in San Francisco, where the company publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time before about 4,000 developers. Google Wave is an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent e-mail and Internet communication in general.

Developers are just starting to get their hands on Google Wave to try it out for themselves, but the public is not expected to get the same chance for several months. We hope to post a hands-on review ourselves in the coming days, but for now, check out the video if you'd like to see Google Wave in action. Be forewarned, it's long (90 minutes).

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There are a lot of great ways to spend a weekend, from catching up on sleep to jetting off for a short getaway. But for a game enthusiast sitting at home bored, without a to-do list or good spring weather, what better way to spend a weekend than to create your own online game? You can build a platform title, or you can develop a puzzle game to perplex gamers.

Unless you're a coding genius, creating your own game requires some help. That's why I've put together a grouping of apps that help you build your own online game. From the simple to the complex, you'll find a bunch of useful tools in this roundup.

Build some games

GameSalad GameSalad uses a simple drag-and-drop interface to help you create your game. It offers a download for your Mac (it's not currently available to Windows users) or a Web plug-in to get started. Once you're ready, the tool provides you with a series of "scenes" that you can edit. From there, you can pick characters, choose enemies, and modify them as you wish. Once it's done, you can share it with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, or embed it on your blog.

Mockingbird Mockingbird lets you create games by using one of its "kits." There are 10 from which to choose, ranging from the "Throw Stuff" kit to the "Bulldozer" kit. Once you've picked the one that most matches the game you're trying to create, you can choose your player design, upload pictures, and pick sounds.

If you don't like the options that Mockingbird provides, you can also create characters from scratch. Once you choose all your options, Mockingbird will build your game and give you the option to try it out. If you're satisfied, you can share it with the Mockingbird community.

Mockingbird is easy to use, but it might be a bit too simple for more advanced developers.

PlayCrafter PlayCrafter lets you create your own Flash game off a premade template. You just drag and drop different elements into your game, which are all controlled by an in-game physics system.

Despite the cookie cutter setup, any elements you add to the game can be modified. You can assign point totals to each element that factor into the game's performance and playability. PlayCrafter is simple and easy to use, and your games will be quite fun. (Check out CNET's full overview of PlayCrafter.)

PopFly Microsoft's PopFly makes it quick and easy to create games online. Like many of its competitors, PopFly's Game Creator boasts a physics engine that can tell when on-screen figures collide or fall due to gravity. You can choose between templates to create a game in just a few minutes, or you can start from scratch. You have the option of creating a side scroller, a 2D shooter, or a puzzle game. And once you're done, you can add it to Popfly or share it on different sites, such as Facebook.

(Check out CNET's full overview of Popfly.)

Sharendipity Sharendipity is a fully customizable tool that makes it easy to create any game you want. The site has a variety of templates with which you can start out, ranging from "Asteroids" to "The Aliens are Coming." Once you pick the template you want, you can modify it to make it unique to your idea; the site lets you edit the images, change sounds, and modify settings.

Sharendipity isn't the most powerful tool in this roundup, but it's a neat tool to play around with, if you're bored.

Sims Carnival The Sims is one of the most successful franchises in the video game industry. And with the help of Sims Carnival, you can create your own game. The tool lets you choose the genre of game you want to create, and once you've picked that, you can determine which parts you want to modify.

Rate, Comment and More! | Personalize This Game | Visit The Sims Carnival

Sims Carnival is a great idea whiteboard for the budding developer. Unlike other tools in this roundup, which provide you with all the options at once, Sims Carnival walks you through the process to make it easier to create the game. By the time you choose all your options, you'll have a game you can preview. If you like it, you can share it with friends.

Sploder Sploder is a game creation tool that helps you pit your character against a variety of enemies. Creating a new game couldn't be easier; you just choose your character, pick the color scheme, pick the controls, and add elements to the level with a drag-and-drop editor. It's as simple as that.

After just a few minutes of modifying the game's design, you can test it and share it with the Sploder community. There's just one issue with Sploder: the games created with the tool feature the same characters, and most are quite similar. That means that you won't be able to create a unique game like you can on other services in this roundup. But if you want develop a quick title, Sploder is one of the fastest of the bunch.

The Top 3

If you want to create some really neat games this weekend, start with these three services:

PlayCatcher

Sims Carnival

PopFly

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Here's a bizarre use of MySpace that I'm actually glad about.

According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice in Columbia, S.C., a man's message on his MySpace page helped authorities arrest him on bank robbery charges.

Joseph Wade Northington, 27, of Roanoke, Va., pleaded guilty Thursday in a Columbia, S.C., federal court to using a firearm during a violent crime.

On January 20, during a visit to North Augusta, S.C. Northington allegedly robbed the Security Federal Bank there of $3,924. After he returned to Virginia, the man with whom he stayed during the visit allegedly recognized Northington in surveillance photos shown on television and notified authorities.

Investigators learned that Northington, who had a gunshot scar on his face, used MySpace, and accessed his page. There they found that he had posted a message mentioning the robbery: "One in the head still ain't dead!!!!!! On tha run for robbin a bank Love all of yall."

Nine days later, Northington was arrested in Virginia.

Northington is now facing a fine of $250,000 and imprisonment for a minimum of seven years and a maximum of life. By Thursday, Northington's MySpace page was still up with the status reading "Wanted."

Considering how he kept his MySpace status up to date, it's going to be very difficult for Northington's attorney to defend him. I just wonder how he's going to survive in a prison where the access to the Internet is limited, if available at all.

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"All your networks are belong to us." That could be the tagline for Zensify, a new iPhone app that lets you view, update, and share content from multiple social networks.

In other words, Zensify aims to take the place of standalone apps for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr--or at least to save you the time of bopping from one to another just to read and post updates.

In addition to those three popular networks, Zensify can connect you with 12seconds, Delicious, Digg, Photobucket, and YouTube. (Support for more services is in the works, according to the developer.)

After you sign into your various accounts (a slow but one-time procedure), Zensify lists all your friends' updates in a single, scrolling timeline. It also presents a scrolling tag bar (this one along the top) so you can quickly filter the timeline based on current trends.

Then there's also the Tag Cloud view, which displays the aforementioned "trendy tags" in a word cloud. I've never been a fan, but it's definitely a neat way to sift through updates.

Zensify's Track tool lets you search all your networks, complete with modifiers for things like tags, usernames, and types of content. It also provides a handy batch of saved searches so you can quickly look for updates that have, say, photos or links, or that come from Flickr or Facebook.

Want to keep an update for future reference? Tap the star icon to mark it as a favorite. Want to post an update or photo to one or more of your own networks? Tap the Post icon. (Finally, an easy way to update Facebook and Twitter simultaneously!)

Unfortunately, while Zensify lets you share or reply to others' Twitter posts, there's no easy way to do likewise with Facebook entries. You can "tap through" to the friend's Facebook page using Zensify's integrated browser, but that's a slow and awkward process. The app really needs to add a low-level reply option.

Of course, it's technically called Zensify Preview, so a few rough edges are to be expected. As it stands, Zensify looks very promising, and I suspect avid social-networkers will like it a lot.

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Improving Outlook is no easy feat given that it's notoriously anti-social when it comes to social networking. The free Outlook plug-in iLook Social and Outlook tries to make Microsoft's ubiquitous e-mail client a bit more sociable by including souped-up searching and filtering, Skype integration, e-mail controls, content and attachment exporting, and Facebook support.

For a sidebar pane, it's a good list of features with an interface that integrates smoothly into Outlook 2007. Desktop e-mail clients are going to have to adapt to social networking far better than they have to survive, especially if the future of e-mail is Google Wave. Postbox does a decent job of remixing Thunderbird for social networking, but it's still in beta and lacks the calendaring you can get in Thunderbird using the Lightning plug-in. While iLook's features are worthwhile, their execution leaves plenty of room for improvement.

The search and Skype features are the strongest, but could still be better. Boolean searches are not supported, nor are cross-folder queries, and the nature of Outlook requires you to manually create a new search results folder that iLook doesn't address. Basically, that means you've got to figure out where your search results are going to go before you see what they are--it's counter-intuitive.

The Skype support is strong, with decent chat quality, contact list support, and other Skype features. Like any third-party Skype plug-in, though, it requires Skype to be running, and iLook wouldn't load if Skype was running before Outlook loaded. The Facebook support was far less convenient than it should've been to convince users to utilize it in iLook. Attachment exporting worked well, but that was more of an alternate path up the mountain than introducing a whole new geography to Outlook.

Making use of the entire iLook experience, unfortunately, will put you in for a bumpy ride. Although Outlook itself isn't known for its speed, this plug-in definitely slows it down. Switching between its features often causes error messages, and it's hard to tell if or how those errors affect either iLook or Outlook. The features that iLook Social and Outlook provides are smart choices, but the end experience is buggy and needs to be tightened before it can be considered for daily use.

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