TL;DR: At present, the “Google essentials” app is a no-frills list of links hidden in an HP PC’s Program Files folder that is strangely not ‘essential’ (no Search, no Chrome, no Gemini or AI, no YouTube, and none of the communications suite beyond Gmail) nor functional (it shows links to web pages, each with a one-line description of the product, for a subset of Google Workspace apps that you already know about, plus Photos, Android phone connectivity (Quick Share & Messages), and Play Games (beta)).

At best, Google Essentials could be an on-device personalized launchpad that could help users find more PC-native ways to install and integrate Google products they already use or might consider using, especially with Microsoft’s re-emboldened efforts to steer users from Google apps to Microsoft’s; or it could help weave your Google data into flagship Windows products (like File Explorer, Outlook, Calendar, Edge, and even the Play Store into the Android susbsystem if it wanted to); or, it could one-click install the Google apps you select to install on your PC. At worst, it could be yet more preinstalled bloatware with little meaningful utility. Unfortunately, at present, the Essentials app is not delivering substantial value.

Specifically, the app provides these links to the following products: Play Games, Quick Share, Photos, Messages, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and Calendar. 80% of the promoted apps require PWA installation, but there are no instructions or suggestions for how to install. And of those 8 apps, 4 of them aren’t even configured to show the URL bar’s tiny prompt to install.

What this surfaces is not so much the limitations of the Essentials app itself, but rather the burden imposed on users when products in an ecosystem don’t define, align, and execute on a shared set of principles before going to market. For instance: should our products show up as Apps or Web pages, or both? should our products be bundled by internal organizational structure or aggregate shared product usage by users? should our products individually or collectively choose which platform, accessibility, and component capabilities to adopt?

By not aligning in advance at the product definition stage, a product ecosystem can inadvertently shine a spotlight on their differences when only showing up together at the marketing stage.

Some general details of note from the Essentials app:

• Google’s most important ecosystem-driving app, Chrome, is conspicuously absent. HP devices ship with Microsoft Edge, not Chrome, installed, so all the Google essentials links open in Edge.
• Further, there is not a hint of today’s ‘most-important thing’ (AI) in any part of this experience… no promotion of Gemini or mention of Workspace’s many rich AI features.
• Several key Workspace apps, like Meet, Chat, and Keep are missing. So are Contacts, one of Google users greatest pain points when shifting between web and native apps.
• By and large, the app promotes the Progressive Web App (PWA) versions of the products it features, even when a better native app exists (e.g. Google Drive for desktop) that would integrate nicely with other native apps. (Note: the Essentials app itself also appears to be a Progressive Web App.)
• With the exception of Play Games and Quick Share (the only two native apps promoted), the app doesn’t show whether a product’s been installed. In other words, a user could open this app with all these products already installed and believe they still have some work to do.
• The app is not connected to your Google Account (as it is served on *.withgoogle.com), which means the “essentials” are assembled once for everyone, not by what products you personally use frequently. This means students & teachers won’t see Classroom, creators won’t see YouTube Studio, and marketers won’t see Ads or Analytics, no matter how many hours a day they use those products.
• Despite the Windows theme set to Dark mode for apps, the Google essentials app stayed bright white ignoring the display mode, which further suggests an absence of Material You theming for the app.
• While the app is only shipped via new HP devices, the app can easily be copied and run on other non-HP PCs. The only distinction at present is whether the 2-months-free Google One promotion is shown (it is on HP PCs; it is not on other PCs).
• No matter the device type you are on (I was on an HP desktop tower), you are told “Google recommends these apps to make the most of your experience on your laptop.” (emphasis mine)
• While announced in the blog post as “Google Essentials,” the app brands itself “Google essentials” and the app icon lists itself as “Googleessentials”. Furthering the brand miasma, this app appears to have no connection with Google Workspace Essentials.

This whole Essentials experience might raise the question about why this was built in this functionally-limited way, separate from Google’s 2 other app stores: the Play Store, which has support to list but not install PWAs on desktops (nor the ability to list or install native desktop apps other than games through the separate Play Games app) or the Chrome Web Store, which neither lists nor installs PWAs or desktop apps (or even its sibling ChromeOS Get Apps and Games store which lists PWAs and Play apps but is not available to view on PCs or Macs).

Because each of these storefronts is optimized for their specific sub-ecosystems, the larger Google ecosystem has no established mechanism to surface, package, and deliver a collection of products with a similar degree of quality as these on PCs or macOS… leaving such efforts resigned to the backwaters of Google’s exhaustive About page or the smaller side efforts like the Google Essentials app.

NOTE: This post was originally featured on LinkedIn.

• Volts podcast re: movie/TV’s climate change representation, new EPA power plant standards, and the energy transition’s 5 supervillains and 5 superhereos
• Everybody in the Pool podcast re: tracking progress toward net zero by 2030
• Shift Key from Heatmap News podcast re: EPA’s carbon crackdown and Elon Musk’s jeopardizing of the EV transition
• Catalyst with Shayle Khan podcast re: news quiz and CO2 utilization
• Not Boring’s analysis of the Base Power Company

• Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet book (finished!)
• Volts podcast re: transferrable tax credits, EPA carbon reduction, and distributed energy resources
• Everybody in the Pool podcast re: natural materials, seaweed “plastics” and Enphase batteries
• Shift Key from Heatmap News podcast re: Tesla sales and Climate Capitalism
• My Climate Journey podcast re: NOAA and Heirloom and CA state senator Scott Weiner
• Catalyst with Shayle Khan podcast re: rare earth elements, battery supply chains, and the Jones Act

• Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet book (25% through)
• Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future book
• Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now book
• Volts podcast re: distributed energy
• Everybody in the Pool podcast re: vertical farming and urban EV charging
• Nate Hagens: The Superorganism and the future: Stockholm Impact/Week 2023, video outlining extractive economic model underlying current behavior

“Coming from families that were focused on sustainable living on family farms and a decade+ investment in electrifying my home, I knew my next career chapter would best be targeted at the burgeoning climate tech fields,” said Laaker.

“Which of the many associated fields, however, was a challenge. I chose the Climate Vine fellowship to get a more detailed understanding of the range of technologies, approaches, and organizations associated with improving living conditions, job opportunities, and economic development, and which might have the most leverage to accelerate those opportunities for others.”

To help others interested in a similar journey, Laaker intends to publish weekly links through the fellowship using the climate tag on his site.

A 1993 graduate of the technology magnet school in Omaha, Laaker was one of seven to be honored as part of 2015’s event. Established in 1983 to honor past graduates who have “achieved outstanding success in their chosen careers,” the event connects alumni with current students via a school-wide assembly, small group discussions, lifetime recap video, Honors Night participation and an awards banquet (while also raising funds for student scholarships).

In a somewhat prescient move (and while still a student), Laaker had previously designed the 1992 Vikings of Distinction program which honored two of his fellow distinguished friends with scholarships: Sharif Liwaru and Sean Morrison.

Laaker’s framed visage now hangs in the main hallway of the school alongside fellow honorees’ portraits. Those interested can read more at the Omaha World-Herald.

The Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, a 501(C3) not-for-profit corporation, secures funding for the Nebraska State Historical Society from individuals and organizations, across the state and beyond, who value Nebraska’s unique heritage and wish to play a personal role in assuring that Nebraska’s history will be accessible to future generations.

Laaker becomes only the third out-of-state Trustee to be elected to the esteemed organization focused on ensuring the expansion of Nebraska’s rich historical legacy. The Trustees help the Society secure private gifts and promote the Society and its activities, as well as provide personal support.

When I joined Graphicly a little over a year ago, we had two primary audiences:

1. customers (those of you who buy, read, and discuss comics), and
2. publishers (those of you who create comics).

Each of these are familiar with a subset of our total product offering. And since 2011 saw a large volume of output from our team, I wanted to share a quick overview of what we released in the past year’s span.

Updates
Graphicly has a large number of “storefronts:” apps where you can browse, buy, read, and comment on our publishers’ content on many different platforms. Each of these has a unique interface that was optimized for the particular device it resides on, and, as such, has unique needs/bugs that pop up over time. So, in terms of updates this past year, we focused on 2 key areas: the Web and iOS.

• Web app
  At Graphicly, we firmly believe that HTML5 is the future of app development. Because of this, we’ve invested heavily in our Web infrastructure over the past year, most noticeably in the form of an entirely revamped Web site launched in June. Formerly just a Chrome Web app, the site now supports all major HTML5-compliant browsers, allows full browsing (and previewing) of all our publishers’ content, and showcases our social integrations (with sharing & commenting across all major social platforms). Additionally for the Web, we launched:
  • Google In-App Payments
    Showcased at Google I/O this past May, we launched integration with Google Wallet on the Web.
  • Chrome Offline access
    In our quest to get our Web app comparable to our client apps, we released offline access for Google Chrome browsers. This allows customers to save their purchased content on their laptop to read when no longer connected to the Internet.

  To top it all off, Google honored us with a case study detailing the success we’ve had with our updated Chrome Web Store App.

• iPhone app
  Our iPhone app had been long in the tooth. This update brought support for iOS5 and cleaned up a number of issues some users had seen on iOS4.
• iPad app
  We pushed several quick updates throughout the year to address some open issues some of our customers had seen previously, as well as updating the appearance to more closely match our Web app.

New releases
2011 saw a tremendous amount of new products from our team, as well.

• Apple iOS5 Newsstand apps
  First out with comics on Apple’s latest iOS5 Newsstand, we launched 9 titles as their own Newsstand apps, meaning that customers get the latest issue downloaded to their iPad the same day the book appears on shelves.
  • The Walking Dead
  • Invincible
  • Irredeemable
  • Savage Dragon
  • Morning Glories
  • Near Death
  • Hack/Slash
  • The Darkness
  • Super Dinosaur
• Android marketplace app
  Graphicly launched the first commercial comics app to offer Marvel Comics content (as well as all our other 300 publishers) back in February. Adoption of our app on the platform was quick and dramatic, and continues to rise. We’ve also released roughly a dozen updates to the app to continue adding features and fixing quirks coming from the myriad devices the platform supports.
• NOOK Color/Tablet apps
  The NOOK platform was the sleeper hit for us this year. Initially releasing 4 apps which sold like hot cakes, we’ve subsequently released 70 collections (bundles of issues) on the platform with phenomenal sales success. We even released a special edition collection for the Cowboys & Aliens movie that launched this past July, which offered unique extra content to customers who took their app on the NOOK Color into a Barnes & Noble store to unlock the features.
• Amazon Appstore apps
  When Amazon announced their Android app store early in the year, we reached out immediately to to ensure our storefront was available. As our product line amassed this year, though, we quickly added the apps available on the NOOK to the Amazon store, of which nearly all were available for the Kindle Fire at its launch.
• Facebook Custom Tab app
  Nearly all of our publishers maintain a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but none had an effective way to show off and preview their product on their Facebook Pages. As such, we launched the only means for publishers to embed, preview, and sell their books on their Facebook Page (as well as to theme and curate the page). As of this writing, there are several hundred Pages now featuring our Custom Tab app with the list growing every week.
• Web widgets
  When we re-launched our site in June, one of our key features was the ability to take any comic to go. Think of it as YouTube for Comics. See a comic or book on our site? Grab a simple embed code, paste it anywhere on the Web (your blog, your site, where ever you like), and that page can now display, preview, and sell that book. Not to mention: Graphicly’s consolidated conversations and social metrics go along for the ride, keeping users connected regardless of location.
• Facebook app
  Although we haven’t done any press on this yet, we launched a full browsable experience on Facebook for users at the end of the year. Now you never need to leave Facebook to browse, buy, and read your library of comics. Of course, social features abound, and we’ll be adding in the ability to pay with Facebook Credits soon.

Retired
One of the most important things a small team in the pursuit of excellence can do is focus. It sounds simple, and, of course, it’s not. One of the realities we saw over the past year was that few users used our targeted Windows 7 products, whether for desktop or mobile. Even without a concerted effort on these products, handling support and infrastructure costs for these apps sapped at our ability to focus on what was critical for both our customers and publishers.

As such, we made the deliberate decision to shutter our two Windows 7 products:

• Windows 7 app
• Windows 7 Phone app

What this meant was straightforward: Graphicly will no longer support, maintain, or enhance these Windows 7 products. Users on these platforms are far from without options, though. In the case of the desktop product, users can easily switch to our AIR application or Web app; for Phone users, the Web app remains the way to go. Microsoft’s subsequent decision to push HTML5 app development for their platforms reinforced our decision, knowing we’ll best be able to serve this audience using technology we’re actively maintaining.

Going Forward
When Graphicly was founded nearly 2 years ago, core to its mission was the widespread availability of great comic content regardless of geography or local inventory. In the time since, we’ve worked diligently with everyone from major publishers (Marvel, Image, etc.) to individual creators (Michael Jasper, Caryn Tate, etc.) to ensure their content could be found on just about any device available. In roughly the span of 1 year, we’ve grown from supporting less than 100 publishers to now more than 300 publishers (and not just in comics, but in children’s books, magazines, traditional books and other visual media). We’ve also seen significant growth in terms of our readers, especially once we released content on the NOOK and Android devices.

2012 will see us continue to ramp up our efforts to build products that support authors of all kinds, and truly help them do what is most important: get their stories seen. Our mission hasn’t changed, but our strategy to get there has certainly matured. We hope you’ll be excited for what’s in store this year, too.

The story was later updated to suggest Wal-Mart did not indeed have such machinations. However, the idea has some interesting points worth considering, especially if you replace “Wal-Mart” with “Target” (or another big box brand).

Target has an amazing geographic footprint in the United States and has already won some awards on improving the pharmacy experience. I would think consumers would like to have the doctor office visit at same place as the pharmacy as there would be less overall waiting and more convenience for drug pickup, especially for parents with kids.

Picture, too, one of these big box retailers having ‘instant pickup’ integrated into a store doctor’s visit. I quite dislike having to leave the doctor’s office only to then have go to a Walgreens at a different location to then ask if they have filled my prescription. Imagine instead: walking out of doc appointment with the doctor’s receptionist handing you a bag with your prescription already filled plus other medical/health-related items recommended by the doc (e.g. gauze, or cough syrup, or compression hose, or whatever), all charged on the same bill/account as the visit itself (less checks to write, less bills/paper to manage). Top it off with a store system-wide health record that follows you to any new town/location, so that even when you’re on holiday/vacation, your records are there and available. No calling up another city to a doctor/nurse that’s not in the office or can’t assist/answer right now.

Now, certainly some doctor offices have pharmacies within (such as PAMF here in Palo Alto), although I’ve yet to see these in-house pharmacies optimize for speed. Additionally, these in-house solutions don’t solve the distributed location problem (for an increasingly transient and mobile population).

Of course, there would absolutely be room for some anti-consumer practices to happen (think: “personalized” higher prices for non-health-related products based on your record, advertising/privacy concerns, etc.), too, but personally I trust Target/Walgreens more to act on my behalf as a health consumer (as they want my overall business) than I do Aetna/Kaiser/BCBS.

Nonetheless, there’ve been several ideas surrounding Shopdeck that I continue to find interesting (namely: building utility out of latent email activity data, and community-based feature extensions). So, rather than keep them contained in discussions among a few, I decided to share the initial/draft pitch deck for Shopdeck with the larger world.

Whether in Shopdeck, a competitor, or somewhere else, hopefully some of the ideas that Zach, I, and others discussed can become more fully formed and useful elsewhere.

P.S. In the time that’s past, there’ve also been a couple interesting startups that have emerged trying to solve a very similar problem: One Receipt, ShopSanity and Lemon. It will be exciting to see where these take the general idea of email-based receipt mining; the market seems to remain ripe for development in this area.

Having spent time earlier this year on optimizing the Graphicly site (and my own) for Facebook’s Open Graph protocol, I hoped that Google+ would take advantage of this existing code infrastructure. Sure enough, Open Graph markup comes over relatively smoothly, but there were a couple surprises that I figured warranted a more detailed write-up.

First, you should note that there are currently 2 means of 3rd-party site content showing up in Google+:

1. a Google+ Stream post with a shared link, or
2. a Google+ +1 post.

So, how do these two posts work, and how do you get your content optimized as such? (Of course, I should note, there is the expected detailed API docs from Google for implementing the +1 button, but no information currently within on how to structure your information for best results in Google+.)

Anatomy of a Google+ Stream Post

The standard view in Google+ is that of the Stream. (It’s somewhat akin to Facebook’s news feed or Twitter’s Timeline.) While it’s contents are not as complex in structure as Facebook’s, you can attach a link to any comment, which then loads a preview beneath the post. Said post is constructed as follows:

A. Favicon is the 16×16-pixel graphical icon hosted at yoursite.com/favicon.ico (or whatever is specified in your site’s <link rel="shortcut icon" ... /> element).

B. Object Title is generally the name of your page, and is originated from the <meta property="og:title" ... /> element first, and the <title ... /> element if no such meta element exists.

C. Image is the display of the content designated in the <meta property="og:image" ... /> element. Important note: only images that are 101px or greater in width and 120px or greater in height will appear; if your image is smaller in dimension, the image will not be considered for the post and the Description text will fill the entire width of the post.

D. Description is the content specified in your site’s <meta property="og:description" ... /> element first, and the <meta name="description" ... /> element if no such meta element exists. The description is capped at 201 characters, after which an ellipsis is added to suggest additional content not shown.

Anatomy of a Google+ +1 Post
A +1 post is unfortunately somewhat buried in Google+; users who click on a user’s profile can then click on their “+1’s” tab (when available, to the right of the main profile photo and beneath the user’s name) to see what content they’ve “big upped.” The post is largely similar in content to the Stream post, but somewhat different in terms of display.

A. Image is the display of the content designated in the <meta property="og:image" ... /> element. Important note: only images that are 101px or greater in width and 120px or greater in height will appear; if your image is smaller in dimension, the image will not be considered for the post and the Description text will fill the entire width of the post.

B. Object Title is generally the name of your page, and is originated from the <meta property="og:title" ... /> element first, and the <title ... /> element if no such meta element exists.

C. Site URL is the second- (and, when relevant, third-_ level domain of your site. It’s inclusion in the display is somewhat odd given its visual prominence via color and its lack of precision (not the full URL to the +1’d object), but it appears to be a throwback to Google’s search results display.

D. Description is the content specified in your site’s <meta property="og:description" ... /> element first, and the <meta name="description" ... /> element if no such meta element exists. Somewhere between 130 and 140 characters of the description are shown here; the exact number appears to be imprecise, as the display doesn’t chop words in the middle leaving a couple incomprehensible characters. However, there is no trailing ellipsis, resulting in sometimes awkwardly abrupt snippets.

Of course, beyond making certain (and testing) each page in your site’s code has the appropriate markup described above, you should also be sure to include Google’s new optimized asynchronously loading +1 button. While Google+ currently segregates its posts, you can certainly see a day coming where +1’s will appear alongside Stream posts.

As a final note, it’s great to see Google leveraging sites’ existing investment in Facebook Open Graph markup. As Google+ matures, it will be interesting to see what other Open Graph tags are also supported, whether Google works actively to extend the Open Graph protocol, and what other developer/publisher tools become available to ease integrations.

Update: Google just posted an article on how to specify which page elements should comprise the headline, image, and description in the +1 post.

But what was the name of that piece? I can’t remember it.* I’m telling everyone who’s seen the art since we installed it about the service itself, but I’d also like to tell them about the piece I’m showcasing. As such, I have a simple proposal for the TurningArt team.

Example of sub-image label

With every piece that is sent to your home, include a tiny paper label to affix beneath the work (à la a museum’s under-art label) with both a description of the piece and a QR code linking to the piece online. I would assume such a label would contain the following info:

1. Title of the artwork
2. Artist name
3. Medium
4. Price tag for outright purchase
5. QR code

Ideally, the QR code would be embedded with the displaying user’s referral ID to not only track who’s driving subscriptions/sales, but also credit them per their existing referral system.

In turn, this solution a) helps TurningArt drive new sales/subscribers, b) helps artists drive fans (and possible sales), c) helps users look a little smarter and become ready-made evangelists for the TurningArt service, and d) gives the uninitiated a simple way to get engaged.

* Obviously, I’ve since looked up the name of the piece since writing this: Yellow Block, by Jodi Chamberlain.

Since joining Graphicly, Laaker has led the charge begin incorporating its first wave of social features in the product’s Web app, launch its Android application, release a rudimentary distributable Web widget, update its iPad application, and define the company’s product roadmap.

“For anyone that has known me since I was very young (or has ever looked at my gift wish list or library record), joining forces with Graphicly is a perfect match,” said Laaker from his new Palo Alto working location. “I have loved comics since I was very young, continue to collect and debate the nuances of story and art with anyone who shows the slightest willingness to listen, and have spent my past 6 professional years working on platforms to help producers get their content/experiences in front of wider audiences (and means for users to socialize them).”

Most recently leading product management, user experience, marketing, and partner relations for Yahoo!’s developer platforms (which make Yahoo! products and services available to 3rd-party developers and publishers), Laaker helped lead Yahoo!’s game partnership deal with Zynga while continuing to push for primary access to Yahoo!’s APIs through YQL.

Originally envisioning his future as the industry’s star comic penciller, Laaker moved into design and product development where he was able to stay close to the visual storytelling media he’d always aspired towards. He led the design teams for the launch of comic legend Stan Lee’s foray into the online world, the Flash-based animated music video for MF Doom, the relaunch of media brand Def Jam Recording’s label site, and the original Flash-based, animated trivia game for the Disney Channel’s Vault Disney. Additionally, he continued his illustration work via board game design and e-cards for Barnes & Noble, among personal projects.

Partnering with the only Micah who has more Twitter followers (sadly by a factor of 10), Laaker joins a strong core team based in Boulder, CO, while continuing to work with a growing West Coast operation in AOL’s Palo Alto incubator lab space.

After linking him up with the good folks at the ACLU, I was happily surprised the other day when I heard back from him that his efforts had been successful. Now, a whole new group of people can experience the world of privacy invasion in their native Hungarian language. Watch “Pizzarendeles,” their alternate take on the original.

Want more info on the OSA effort? Check out their privacy portal page.

If, however, you are a fan of the “Farmville in medieval times” and the “Farmville in, well, Farmville times” game titles that are all the rage with the kids (and Jimmy Fallon), I have compiled some data that may help you make some educated decisions in-game. Namely, I’ve attempted to compile the earning ratios of both crops and buildings (the two revenue- and experience-generating facets of the games) so as to minimize the time I needed to spend to jump levels. And now I’ve opened that data up in hopes that its of help to someone else playing the game.

Please note, however, that none are complete, largely due to the fact that I’m a casual player of these games. (As of writing this, I am level 27 in We Rule and level 11 in We Farm, both of which have levels going well into the 30s, I believe..) As such, I can see that there are levels I haven’t achieved, but I can’t fill in the details until I get there. (Are you already there at the finish line? Then please skip to the end of this post to see how you can help.)

For any developers out there interested in leveraging this data in their apps, too, you can grab (and query and filter) the entire data set using YQL (Yahoo! Query Language). (After recently reading Christian Heilmann‘s fantastic “How to Create a Web Service in a Matter of Minutes,” particularly the “Turning an Editable Data Set into a Web Service” section, I knew I had a great project worth testing against his example.)

Just run these queries thru YQL, and you’re off and running.

• select * from ngmoco.we.rule.crops
• select * from ngmoco.we.rule.structures
• select * from ngmoco.we.farm.structures
• select * from ngmoco.we.farm.crops

Frustrated that this isn’t comprehensive? Care to enhance the data? It’s all available in a large Google Docs spreadsheet. Chip in, and help refine the data set. (Even better? It’s already got 2 sheets waiting for We City to drop.)

Lastly, if you’re looking for someone else to add to your collectives in these games, I’m “mlaaker” in both games.

But, unlike blogging or even some advanced message boards, these activity streams hide the results of such posts from the very people who publish them. How many other people click on a link that you share? How many people even saw your activity stream post? If you look at the interfaces for these streams, you’d assume people didn’t care about whether other people care about their posts. The absence of visible analytics per post, however, belie the desire of people to know the impact of their effort.

Google Analytics’ self-service, free solution (among many others) for any Web page quickly demonstrated how import content publishers considered the performance of their publishing. And, already, the rise of URL shortening-and-tracking services such bit.ly and awe.sm demonstrate that those who actively publish content through these streams want to know how their content performs with services like Twitter and Facebook.

Think such analytics aren’t popular with the mainstream and only useful for power users? Remember Web counters? There remain hundreds (possibly thousands, if you have the time to tally up all the true solutions from the 1.2 billion results for “web counters”) of easy-to-integrate tools for users to both track visitors and show others how meaningful are their contributions to the Web. One needn’t look at nerd technology for this validation, either. Before you tell a joke, do you think about the number of laughs you got from your last re-telling of the entertaining tale? We are a social people, and the striving for validation that comes from our peers’ responses to our actions have long governed most folks’ actions at nearly every level of our development.

But, back to nerd technology… Facebook has long had a “Like” button underneath each item in their news feed, and Twitter has also long-served a “favorite this tweet” button (i.e. the star icon) next to each of its tweets. (Additionally, Twitter offers the “Retweet” functionality, which exposes a visible counter of others’ retweets.) These indicators are great means of determining our peers’ positive responses to each micro-publication, but they do not capture the true value behind each of these micro-publication: the number of clicks a link generates divided by the number of times it has been displayed to other people. And, not only is the publisher of the link robbed of this information, so to is her audience.

So, why would exposing these numbers and ratios be valuable to people and publishers?

On a page with 10 links from 10 different people, which should I click on? Obviously, the subject matter matters as does the publisher (if they’re somehow connected to me). But if I don’t know the publisher, and the subject matter is all the same, which link should I check out? Some people, of course, will want to follow the road least travelled; most, however, would trust the one with the most traffic (as the preceding people voted for the best link with their clicks).

From a publisher’s standpoint, knowing what types of content my readers click on (and what content they see but don’t bother clicking through to) helps me tune what I deliver to my audience. Even as a publisher of just my life’s activities (i.e. what I generally post on Facebook), if I know no one clicks on my activities posted from games, I might think twice before connecting Facebook and the next game I install; connecting such a game would just produce more chaff, which will dilute the value of all my posts in my readers’ eyes.

So, assuming such analytics should be exposed, what would these activity streams look like if they began surfacing such statistics? Twitter’s Retweet exposure (and contact card overlay) offers a glimpse:

In this vein, links could have a hover state (akin to the Twitter user hover card) where link click-throughs can be displayed (as well as the target of an URL, if the URL displayed is that of an URL shortener).

Publishers, of course, might also receive more details than those displayed for all people. Facebook Pages similarly provides a sneak peek at this direction (where the highlighted details in the screenshot below are displayed only to the Page’s publisher):

By exposing statistics to both all people and the publishers themselves, the hosts of these activity streams can provide a more meaningful, measurable and desirable experience to all users. And, in doing so, help us find the validation we look for in nearly all our daily activities.

That’s 35 years of high-quality content livin’ that I’m proud to have sponsored, but the clock’s ticking. So I’m turning to you, who’ve tuned in for some portion of that time, free of charge, to help with the only pledge drive I’ve run.

If you’ve enjoyed any of my daily broadcasts, Hobbit sketches, blog posts, illustrations, icons, technical how-tos, presentations, HyperCard stacks, tweets, tirades, anti-tree propaganda sites, conversations, space beats, or awkward silences, *and* haven’t chipped in, consider this your opportunity to join in for my birthday pledge week.

Consider for a minute: you pay for cable and Internet access to be available every day. Some of you pay for public radio. Like all 3 of those, I have to keep the lights on for your entertainment: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, 35 years a life… and hopefully more.

This year, please consider funding my continued content production via a donation to charity:water. They rock. 100% of your donation goes to building wells, training communities, and keeping the projects sustainable. (Their nonprofit overhead is funded thru an entirely different fundraising arm.) All human beings have the same right to clean, safe drinkable water as what we have in the US. Even those on my Enemies List.

So, please, do me a favor: if you’ve enjoyed any of my output over 35 years, pitch in to help build a well where its needed. I’ll keep producing. (Matter of fact, I’ll even pledge more output if we hit my goal of $2500.)

I have two days left to hit this goal, and I need the help of my friends from over the years. Can you join in this one and only Laaker.com Birthday Pledge Drive?

But now, with Google TV having just been announced at Google I/O (where its Android platform powers the Apps, the set-top device and remote), there is a new rumor going ’round: the Apple TV will be reborn as a smaller, cheaper box running the iPhone OS, iPhone A4 processor, and cloud-hosted media. Makes sense to me, even two years ago.

With Google, Boxee, Roku, TiVo and many others ratcheting up the iTV fight, Apple will likely re-engage in this space. Their (sad for me) acquisition of Lala would seemingly be focused on how to incorporate the technology/people behind it’s cloud-based storage of media.

Apple already owns the mobile screen in the US (with iPod, iPad, and iPhone) and is doing well on the desktop/laptop screen ownership. Why not the last (and first) screen in nearly every household? Such a move would not only help its current reign, but also extend its gaming footprint into the world of Sony and Nintendo. It would appear to just be a matter of time now…

Like most Americans my age, I’ve had my fair share of laughs at Gary’s expense over the years. But, unlike most, I actually got to spend an evening with Gary at the close of the century, and it was quite unforgettable. (PS: Special shout-out to Paul Chan for making that whole event go down. Still appreciate it, buddy.)

There were two particularly sad moments that stick out.

First: he was clearly very sad. Not just that evening, but as a lifestyle choice. Thanksgiving was a couple days away, and I asked him what he’d be doing for the holiday. “What do I have to be thankful for?,” he asked. “I’m alone, my parents took all my money, and I’m stumping around on this tour to make ends meet.” The line wasn’t delivered with irony, or even anger… just more of a sad observation.

Anyone who knows my often-cheery self can imagine me trying to counter with what he had to be thankful for, as well as inviting him back to Omaha to have Thanksgiving with my family. It didn’t work, and his melancholy lurked as an undertone throughout the entire evening.

Second: he called me the day after we met up, asking if I’d build a website for his model train hobby-turned-business. I wasn’t there when he called, so all I had was his voicemail recording. (As I remember, I couldn’t catch the number to call him back.) I was mostly just shocked that he called me. We’d talked the night before, and he’d asked for my card. I’d just thought the whole thing was entertaining: Gary Coleman was asking me to build a website to sell his plans for model trains.

It occurred to me later that I was probably among the few people that appeared to have taken him seriously. (I did hand him my card and say, “Dude, definitely call me about that.”) But, of course, I hadn’t taken him seriously, and I didn’t call him back. I did see years later that he was still trying to get such an operation off the ground, and have had some small pains of guilt since for not responding seriously.

I’m thankful that I got to meet him, and I’m sorry to see that he passed.

This is big. 80 million users play Farmville, on average, a month on Facebook. 28M for Poker. 23M for Mafia Wars. These users bring their friends and family along to build and tend virtual farms, whack mob bosses, and perfect their poker face. Zynga and Yahoo! both will actively promote their latest games on Yahoo!’s canvases, and Yahoo! in turn will build extensive hooks for all developers (ALL developers) to re-engage their users post-install.

Additionally, we’ll be working to expose new engagement channels to drive repeat usage of Apps in a way Yahoo! never did before: navigational links to a user’s favorite Apps and persistent requests on every page of our network. New places to play Zynga (and other) games. A far richer social graph than users have today.

My team, and the larger Yahoo! family, have been and continue to work around the clock to make lots of new opportunities open up for all 3rd-party developers. You can read more on my YDN post about the developer-facing components, as well as the TechCrunch scoop on the deal. It’s exciting to be able to share the news.

All they heard was whining and how you couldn’t do anything modern with Web-based Apps. Too slow. No offline access. Not enough system-level controls/hooks.

So, they hunkered down, doubled back, and made the premiere “closed” App ecosystem. Sold like hotcakes. Got mobile curmudgeons to start thinking about mobile-dominant futures. Got 10-year-olds excited about programming. Made individual developers’ works available to the world with only a $99 budget.

And they’re now hated for not being “open.”

I’m not going to defend Apple, or get into whether Android is better because of it’s open nature. (I will say it looks like a rosy future for Android, though.) Me? I love Apple hardware and software (and their somewhat-open ecosystem), but am deeply troubled by their mobile ecosystem’s closed marketplace (in other words, not the store itself, but simply that I can’t side load software onto devices I own outright without Apple blessing it first).

So troubled that I’d get rid of my iPhone and iPad? Absolutely not. So zealous that I won’t consider Android? Nope, already have one, and will be an excited early adopter of Google TV.

The “open” argument will win against iPhone only as soon as Android marketshare and dollars start hurting Apple. I doubt Steve Jobs will spend much time listening to his critics a second time until then.

Email’s great, but those receipts compete for attention with email from your mom, friends, colleagues, etc. which makes them hard to find when you’re trying to look up past purchases, track packages or find the store you bought some shoes from a year ago.

Enter Shopdeck. Shopdeck is a personalized, filtered shopping experience.

Thanks to OAuth, Shopdeck lets you grant access to your Yahoo! and Google mail accounts. Once authorized, the app mines your email for receipts and order invoices, parses those matches for the useful information, and aggregates it inside Shopdeck.

The app’s home screen becomes a dashboard of your favorite stores… not a random set of stores you don’t care about. These are the stores from which you’ve already made purchases.

Similarly from those same parsed emails, you can get quick access to recent (and long-past) purchases, track the associated packages, and quickly go to site for a particular invoice detail.

Plus, you now have a launcher, search box, and history for the stores you already trust.

And, when I say “now,” I really mean “soon.” Shopdeck was demo’d at iPadDevCamp (thanks to the awesome skills of one Zach Graves), but still has some work to do before submitting to Apple.

In the meantime, see more at Shopdeckapp.com and @shopdeckapp.

(Update: Name updated to Shopdeck to avoid trademark issues.)

At the time of this publication, m13.me links will now redirect to Laaker’s links of choice.

“From whence the m13.me domain came, you ask?” asked Mr. Laaker. “Unfortunately, all the meaningful short URLs were unavailable. Laa.kr was snatched by Korean firm who apparently hasn’t figured out how to configure their site yet, Mic.ah doesn’t exist as there is no ‘.ah’ top-level domain, and Laak.er would require registering the domain through the currently unavailable (according to Wikipedia) and war-ravaged Eritrea. That left us with my first initial and my lucky number. That, or a number of far more expensive and equally irrelevant options. So, m13.me it is.”

The domain will leverage Bit.ly Pro, a service powered by Bit.ly (which was featured previously in Laaker’s Micahâ€s (11) Favorite Things For 2009).

Granted, they’re no equivalent to Robert Goulet’s list, but they should still provide a good break from your daily reading.

So, with no further ado, here’s my list of the best of 2009:

• 1Password
  1Password pops up over and over again on my best-of lists for a simple reason: it’s one of my most-used and useful pieces of software I own. It passively collects the usernames and passwords you enter around the Web in any browser (soon to support Chrome), and makes them available to you anytime you return to these sites. Additionally, it offers “bookmarks” (in a sense) that not only take you to the site, but automatically step through the authentication screens in the browser. For those (banking/financial) sites with multiple screens for signing in, this can be a time-saver.

  Get 1Password ($39.95)…

• Dropbox
  I was turned on to Dropbox by the 1Password crew. It offers the ability to use 1Password’s keychain across multiple computers, although it’s primary selling point is likely it’s free 2GB storage that operates like a normal folder on your Mac and PC, available whether you’re online or offline. Additionally, it offers versioning of files, which means you can roll back to a previous edit of anything you save in your Dropbox folder… a.k.a. unlimited undos.

  Get Dropbox (free)…

• Evernote
  Managing notes securely across devices and platforms was a bit difficult before Evernote. I used to store my hardware and software serial numbers in Yahoo! Notepad, and other HTML-formatted and image-rich notes in MobileMe’s iDisk or my own self-hosted wiki. Now, regardless of where I am, I can create, edit, and view rich notes (i.e. HTML formatting, inline images, etc.) on my iPhone, my home iMac, my work laptop, or any Web browser anywhere. Additionally, any images that I upload are OCR’d, meaning the text inside them becomes searchable soon after uploading them.

  Get Evernote (free)…

• Bit.ly
  Bit.ly is one of the many, many URL shorteners available today, but it has featureed two very important advantages over the competition. First, it has incredibly rich analytics: for any link I shorten via Bit.ly, I get real-time visualizations showing how many people are clicking on my link to-the-minute, as well as where (and Twitter posts are shown directly on the page, showing context). Second, their API has made it incredibly easy for other developers to incorporate into their applications… meaning that regardless of what product you’re using, you can still see how popular are the links you share.

  (Note: nearly all the links in this post are tracked via Bit.ly.)

  Try Bit.ly (free)…

• Boxee
  As a longtime fan of (and pontificator about) the Apple TV, I was a bit surprised this past year about how many times I discouraged others from buying one. Instead, I encouraged them to invest in lightweight PC set-top boxes with HDMI output… all so they could run Boxee on it. Some time ago, I cancelled cable TV (still keep Comcast for Internet connection) as all the TV I wanted to watch was available through Hulu and the Internet, and that plus Netflix are funneled through Boxee’s interface. To make the deal even sweeter, Boxee shows you what you’re friends have been watching, rating, and recommending, so you still have something to talk about around the water cooler the next day.

  And, say you’re not as adventurous (and frustrated) as I am for trying to build your own Apple TV replacement. No problem. Boxee will have their own hardware available for sale soon.

  Try Boxee (free)…

• Titanium Mobile
  I’ve really been impressed with the Appcelerator team down the street from me in Mountain View. This past year, they’ve rapidly released a tool (Titanium Mobile) which allows folks with Web development skills (i.e. HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.) to author iPhone and Android mobile applications without learning a line of Objective-C code.

  With Titanium Mobile, I was able to get an iPhone application, however crude, running and leveraging 3rd-party Web content on my iPhone. It reminded me of the excitement I felt when I authored my first HyperCard stack in the 80s.

  I have many Objective-C/Cocoa masters as friends who decry Appcelerator’s, Adobe’s, and many others’ attempts at authoring applications outside of Apple’s Xcode. In many ways, I see Titanium doing for the iPhone and Android what WYSIWYG Web authoring applications did for the Internet; they won’t be training a legion of Objective-C masters… but they will expose a wider audience to the possibilities of these platforms (which, in turn, will ensure that more Web products get mobile counterparts in a much quicker fashion).

  Download Titanium Mobile (free)…

• Fluid
  Another top, best-of list award-winner for me is Fluid. Fluid is a Mac application that converts Web sites into standalone applications. Why? For me, it ensures that my Web mail accounts (which generally are very Javascript intensive) don’t cause my main Web browser to crash (as the sites aren’t then loaded in the main browser), as well as show the number of unread messages in the dock icon (a la Apple’s Mail.app).

  Additionally, GreaseKit and custom userstyles are available to any Fluid-generated application, making user customization and Firefox Greasemonkey enhancements available to your favorite sites.

  Download Fluid (free)…

• Foursquare
  Somewhere in the latter half of 2009, I became a Foursquare junkie. Foursquare is a location-centric Web site and application(s) that lets you “check in” wherever you go in the physical world: a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, etc. Most check-ins earn points (which rank you against your friends, as well as against everyone in your city), most-frequent check-inners earn “mayorships” (which some establishments reward with freebies/discounts), and all of your check-ins are broadcast (at your discretion) to your friends who also use the app. Why is this interesting? I don’t know. But it is addictive. And competitive. And it lets my team know when I’m in the office.

  Try Foursquare (free)…

• Mint
  Mint needs very little sales pitch, as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve ever used Quicken or Microsoft Money (two very, very, very painful and money “managing” applications). With the latter, you pay them every year for meaningless updates, and you do all the work (downloading bank statements, categorizing expenses, etc.); with Mint, you pay them nothing, and they do all the work.

  Mint tracks (but can’t withdraw, transfer, edit, etc.) your various financial accounts (and investments, such as stocks, property and cars), catalogues and classifies each transaction (using learning from all its users to ensure ever-better classification and labeling), provides rich, illustrative visualizations of your spending habits (and how they compare to others’), and can alert you when something is out of the ordinary (via SMS, email, etc.).

  Mint helped me spot identity theft within 24 hours (thus minimizing damage) and an awry bank auto-pay transaction within minutes. I hope to never return to the likes of Quicken and Money thanks to the good folks at Mint (who now run Quicken, ironically).

  Start using Mint (free)…

• Lala
  Earlier this year, I decided to never buy music (or movies) from Apple again. While Apple has since moved to a DRM-free format and higher-quality bitrate, a considerable amount of music that I “own” is locked into a format playable only on Apple-branded devices or software. Lala, in turn, offers the ability to play any of your music (whether purchased from Apple, Amazon, anywhere else, or even CDs you ripped in the past), accessible from any Web-connected device. Want to listen to something, but don’t care about “owning” the music (i.e. the Apple model)? No problem: Lala only sets you back 10 cents a track (1/10th of Apple’s fee). (You can download music for $0.89/track, too, if you want a high-quality, DRM-free file to do with as you please.)

  Every week, I move another DVD full of previously-ripped music up to Lala, making iTunes simply an iPhone-synchronization-only application at this point for me. (Sadly, Apple purchased Lala this month, seemingly to make me renege on my decision… or to adopt a better model for all iTunes customers.)

  Try Lala (free)…

• Jolicloud
  This year I saw how I will be working sometime in the near future: a series of “applications” that are simply Web sites with “local” storage (i.e. the ability to operate when not connected to the Web). It sounded far off a couple months back until I tried Jolicloud, a new operating system designed for netbooks (although its worked great on two desktop PCs I have, too).

  In essence, Jolicloud is simply Ubuntu Linux with a pretty UI, an App Store filled with popular Web sites wrapped with Mozilla’s Prism (which is very much akin to Fluid, mentioned above), and an account that is managed in the cloud (meaning all your PC’s settings, keychains, applications, preferences, etc. get synced with the Jolicloud server and available to the next PC you sign in to). Even better? It already supports Lala, Boxee, Dropbox, Mint, Evernote, and Bit.ly right out of the box.

  Download Jolicloud (free)…

That’s it for my 2009 best-of list. Noticeably conspicuous are any Apple products (Lala doesn’t count), the Adobe Updater application (3 years later, and still frustrating users daily), and anyone/thing on my Enemies List.

For those unfamiliar, Hellboy is the (clearly) fictional spawn of the devil, summoned to Earth by an unholy alliance of Nazis, Rasputin, and occultists as a weapon against the Allies in World War II. Of course, like all things involving Nazis, Rasputin, and occultists, things go wrong. Allied forces intervene, and a young Hellboy is adopted and nurtured by an American professor who also happens to run a Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. As Hellboy grows, he retains fierce loyalty to the USA and fights off occult threats around the world.

It’s a classic “local boy done good” kind of story… documented in many comic books, graphic novels, prose and motion pictures.

So, with all of this in mind, I give you my hand-sculpted, hand-painted Hellboy Christmas ornament. It took one evening of sculpting and baking (as I used Sculpey as the material), and another evening to paint it and the surrounding globe.

Headlining for Chapter 17 (“Open for Business”), Laaker’s “What does it mean to be Open?” essay kicks off the chapter detailing how to expose your product via APIs to the outside developer community. (The essay, in verbal and visual form, was also recently featured at Ignite NYC during the Yahoo! Open Hack Developer Conference.)

At the request of the authors, the essay is reprinted in its entirety below. Mr. Laaker alternatively recommends, though, that you stop reading now, and instead go buy/get a copy of the book to experience it in person.

What Does it Mean to Be Open?

The word “Open” is jam packed with meaning for those in the software/Web services landscape, and it can be increasingly difficult find two folks who agree on its definition as the term proliferates. For some, “open” is associated with “free;” for others, it is associated with flexibility and utility outside of its original location.

Because of this lack of agreement around definition, it can be useful to think of “openness” within a construct that can help describe its various edges. These edges follow a 13-point spectrum that begins on technology (and the developer experience), moves into the world of data, and then ends with the user experience.

It is important to note that none of the following points described on this spectrum are meant to be independent nor incompatible. Rather, think of this spectrum like time theory; it can be bent, twisted, and collide with other points on the spectrum so that any product or service could be none, one, many or all of the facets described.

1. Open Source
   Free to use, decentralized, and (generally) highly reliable, this software movement seems to drive most folks†definition of “open.” (Examples include projects such as PHP, OpenOffice, and Hadoop.)
2. Open Infrastructure
   Emerging as a new kind of openness, “cloud computing” has opened a pay-as-you-go, only-what-you-need approach to technology. (Examples in this area include Google App Engine and Amazonâ€s EC2 and S3 services.)
3. Open Architecture
   By defining a spec for how others can plug into your product, anyone can mod and extend your product. (A popular example of this would be Firefoxâ€s plugin framework.)
4. Open Standards
   A community-powered, consensus-driven approach drives for a goal of interoperability, whether for software or hardware. (Examples of these standards can be found throughout the Webâ€s very fabric: HTML, CSS, XML, and JSON.)
5. Open Ontology
   Add meaning to the Web by surrounding your data with semantic meaning (so that software can make meaningful connections). (RDFa, a.k.a. Resource Description Framework in attributes, and microformats best exemplify this element.)
6. Open Access
   By providing APIs, 3rd-party developers and partners can take your data/service into their products. (Examples of open access include Twitter, Yahoo! BOSS, and eBay.)
7. Open Canvas
   Your product can become a vehicle for 3rd-party content by opening portals into other products (while keeping users on yours). (The most popular example of this element is Facebookâ€s application platform and the ever-growing usage of OpenSocial APIs.)
8. Open Content
   The user becomes the editor by programming self-relevant content which comes to you when itâ€s ready. (My Yahoo! pioneered this space, but other RSS readers like Google Reader, NetVibes, and NetNewsWire are similar strong examples.)
9. Open Mic
   The productâ€s content is populated entirely by users, not by the product team. Users own their content, and products support the making/discovering of content. (YouTube and WordPress share both an affinity for mid-name capitalization and an approach that centers almost exclusively on user-generated content.)
10. Open Forum
    Users form a rich web around content by contributing ancillary data, ratings, reviews, ranking, conversations and link submissions. (Examples of community-driven content layers of significant user value include NetFlixâ€s ratings/reviews and Diggâ€s content ranking system.)
11. Open Door
    The user is welcomed and embraced as a product decision-maker in this corporate bizarro world. (Think: Get Satisfactionâ€s customer-driven customer service or Craigslistâ€s revenue model determination process.)
12. Open Borders
    Settings and configurations become portable. Import/export is the requirement, and the user is not locked-in to a single product, instead having the ability to come and go as they please. (As an example, OPML, a.k.a. Outline Processor Markup Language, is used extensively to manage the export and re-import of users†RSS feed subscriptions and groupings.)
13. Open Identity
    The user is the owner of her identity and information, metering out bits to services/products as she finds it appropriate. This is in opposition to the near-universal approach of surrendering control of user information at every service with no central means of management. (OpenID, fittingly, best illustrates the idea of Open Identity, alongside its Attribute Exchange extension.)

The 13 points illustrate many of the different concepts that flesh out the term “Open.” And, while many are compatible and complementary, it is rare to find any one product or service that exemplifies all of these elements.
Why is that? While being Open can be a competitive advantage, it can also have what some would list as disadvantages. It may force constraints by which the competition isnâ€t hindered, determine product direction, outsource key infrastructure, or free previously proprietary information. Fortunately, there are no horror stories available of companies who bet the bank on Open only to be cannibalized by the competition; rather, there are many success stories to the counter.

It is also important to note that all these points require a level of investment and effort beyond not being Open. One could easily argue, however, that this time/cost is quickly recouped (in terms of PR, customer support, brand affinity, product extension, and more). Existing companies and products attempting to move towards any of these facets will therefore face more hurdles and obstacles (whether real, i.e. technology, or imagined, i.e. internal politics) than those with no existing baggage.

In the end, being Open can mean a number of different things, some of which is dependent on the nature of the product it describes and some of which is the choice of the productâ€s owners. Regardless, though, product owners should understand the marketplaceâ€s Open vocabulary, and consciously steer it’s messaging to users and the press around the points it has embraced (and have articulated answers in response to those points it does not embrace).

Doing so can keep Open as the advantage its intended for a product, rather than as a weapon against it.

I intentionally list developers first, as I strongly believe developer-friendly products encourage significant innovation on top of Web products… which, in turn, greatly benefit everyone else (who get features and support for niches that no product could conceivably support on its own).

I am happy to announce, after significant time and effort from a great crew of present (and past) talent at Yahoo!, we now support Apps built by 3rd-party developers (i.e. people who don’t work for Yahoo!) on the Yahoo! Homepage. What this means is you can now add just about any type of content and functionality to the Web’s most popular starting experience.

More than a dozen of these Apps can be found right now by clicking the “+ Add” link next to “My Favorites” on Yahoo.com. From managing your money with recently-acquired-by-Intuit Mint.com, to checking out the weekly ads for Target stores, to puzzle-solving games with Flood-It!: there is an App to suit your interests.

Disagree? Get started building one today… there’s no fees (although you can make money inside your App as you like), no complex SDK (write your code the way you prefer on your server), and no obtuse App Store approval process (instantly share your App with millions and/or promote it using Yahoo!’s in-product App galleries).

To do this, the Yahoo! Developer Network lets you:

• learn more about YAP (our App development platform),
• get up and building an App, and
• create/manage your Apps.

Let me know your experience with these Open Apps on Yahoo.com… I’m excited to see my team’s work see such a large online audience, but I’m also equally exciting about adding even more support and features for developers soon.

Update: TechCrunch has just covered the release of the Mint.com App (and others) on Yahoo.com.

The App’s visual representation of the buildings are handled by beautifully-rendered illustrations (by Kalani Kordus) rather than over top of a Google map. This affords an ability to see each level of each building and highlight only elements of importance (conference rooms, not janitors’ closets).

The App, however, is missing some very important information. It doesn’t know -where- these important elements are. And because it doesn’t know that, it can’t know where I am in relationship to the rooms.

To know where such things exist, a location data store (describing lat/long locations of every object’s borders) must exist. The problem is, how do you get the very data that has, to date, been hard to come by? How can Apps get access to location data which isn’t in Google Maps already but is relevant to a group of people? In other words, how do we move from just understanding objective data (such as “Golden Gate Park” or “701 1st AVE, Sunnyvale, CA 94089”) to something more subjective (such as “de Young museum lawn” or “Yahoo! 1st floor bathroom”)?

I think the answer is somewhat simple: build a mobile App and a website to leverage those same people who’d be interested in the data in the first place. As they have a vested interest in the service, these users could accomplish tasks fed to this App by the developer looking to harvest and use the data.

To do this, the App would need to do several things:

1. Sign In/Register. Not because users love making new accounts, but rather because the system will need to support private projects and online storage.

2. Location capture. Lat/long coordinates WITH WiFi base station MAC address. Also any info from gyroscope and compass, if possible. (Could be useful if you’re wanting to plot where the door to a room is, or indicate direction.)

3. Metadata capture. User-added tags, notes, photos, videos, audio, etc. (Optional, but could feed the developer useful materials.)

4. Project selection. Choose a community project (whether public or private) based on current location and/or user account; or, choose a personal project.

5. Settings. Assuming most users will be submitting several locations towards the same goal, the App must facilitate rapid entry where it’s default is to use the last-used project, tags, etc. (Maybe the App should set a distance threshold, so that if a user captures a location 6 miles away from the previous location, the App assumes a new project?)

6. Submission queue. Connectivity could fail at any point; hold onto any captures that haven’t yet been submitted.

Additionally, this App will need a Web front-end (where developers can post projects, determine whether anyone or just a select few can participate, review results, modify entries, get access to the data via data dumps (i.e. CSV, XML, etc.) or data feeds (i.e. An API), and highlight their most prolific/helpful contributors. Assumedly users should be able to access the site, too, to modify their submissions, see the results of their participation, and sign up for projects not yet tackled.

The value of such an App would seem to be immense to anyone building location-aware Apps whose locations aren’t covered (or applicable) on Google Maps and other traditional mapping/location services. Developers could offer successful contributors money ala Mechanical Turk, a free copy of their App, or just recognition of who helped out.

There’s already been numerous successful user-submitted tagging enterprises to-date. Why not one for location, where the user doesn’t even need to learn lat/long coordinates, machine tags, or anything technical? Instead, all they need is the desire to help, an iPhone/Android phone, and the ability to press a button when at a location a developer requests.

Sounds possible. The question is: who wants to help build it?

• Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, real name, age, sex, location, work and education history, and interests),
• Read your user’s list of friends/connections,
• Read/Write your user’s status message,
• Read your user’s list of Updates (i.e. their activities from Yahoo! and the rest of the Web),
• Write your user’s activities from inside your app into her Updates stream,
• Query, filter, and join any data from Yahoo! and other Web services via YQL, and
• Broker your user’s permission to access this information using OAuth.

What does all this mean? It’s simple. An app using this SDK can pull in my Yahoo! profile information, plot me and my friends on a map (grabbing the locations stored in our profiles), compare our listening preferences (grabbing our favorite music preferences), and broadcast my activity (i.e. “Micah just posted a new high score of 18,478 in Bejeweled 2“) which, in turn, drives my friends (and more) to your app.

You can learn more at YDN (as well as find all the documentation).

And, if you build anything interesting using the code, please let me know… we’re always interested in showcasing great developer-built solutions (using Yahoo! technology) on the YDN blog. Even better, come out and join in at the iPhone Dev Camp Yahoo! is hosting July 31 – August 2, 2009.

In the talk, I spoke about what it meant to be “Open.” The word “Open” is pretty packed with meaning, and I rarely find two folks who agree on its definition. For instance, a colleague of mine raised hackles when he saw the term “Open” applied to BOSS, Yahoo!’s open search engine service because there was a for-pay tier of service (despite it allowing search functionality inside of other’s products, largely free). In his mind, “open” was associated with “free,” whereas for me, it was associated with flexibility and utility outside of its original location (i.e. inside Yahoo! Search).

Because of this, and many other similar conversations over the past 4 years, I wanted to provide a framework for how one can assess a product or platform’s “open-ness.” Below are the 13 facets of openness that I’ve been cataloging as a means to better describe this term. (They range on a scale starting on the technology side and ending on the side of the user’s experience.)

1. Open Source
   Free to use, decentralized, and (generally) highly reliable, this software movement seems to drive most folks’ definition of “open.”

2. Open Infrastructure
   Emerging as a new kind of openness, “cloud computing” has opened a pay-as-you-go, only-what-you-need approach to technology.

3. Open Architecture
   By defining a spec for how others can plug into your product, anyone can mod and extend your product.

4. Open Standards
   A community-powered, consensus-driven approach drives for a goal of interoperability, whether for software or hardware.

5. Open Ontology
   Add meaning to the Web by surrounding your data with semantic meaning (so that software can make meaningful connections).

6. Open Access
   By providing APIs, 3rd-party developers and partners can take your data/service into their products.

7. Open Canvas
   Your product can become a vehicle for 3rd-party content by opening portals into other products (while keeping users on yours).

8. Open Content
   The user becomes the editor by programming self-relevant content which comes to you when it’s ready.

9. Open Mic
   The product is populated entirely by users, not by you (a.k.a. the product team). Users own their content, and products support the making/discovering of content.

10. Open Forum
    Users form a rich web around content by contributing ancillary data, ratings, reviews, ranking, conversations and link submissions.

11. Open Door
    The user is welcomed/embraced as a product decision-maker in this corporate bizarro world.

12. Open Borders
    Settings and configurations become portable. Import/export is the requirement, and the user is not locked-in to a single product, instead having the ability to come and go as they please.

13. Open Identity
    The user is the owner of her identity and information, metering out bits as she finds appropriate.

With this list in mind, you can see the presentation in its entirety below:

In many ways, this list (and presentation) is an early draft, and I’d welcome additional thinking on the subject. How are others defining and planning for openness?

Update: YDN posted a recap of my talk alongside examples of each of the 13 facets of openness.

Confirmed for Tuesday, April 14, 7:30pm, Laaker is set to give the first of two talks entitled “Designing Your Product as a Platform.” The talk is billed as: “Learn how Yahoo! is designing its products to leverage third-party developers, embrace outside content, and weave its services into the larger web’s fabric, all as part of its “Open Strategy” efforts.” Laaker plans to walk through Yahoo!’s recent efforts to redesign and rebuild its products to be both more ‘open’ (to third-party developers) and ‘social’ (amongst its massive user base).

Co-headlining the event is Dan Brodnitz, creative cataloguer of the creative class, who will be presenting “20 Conversations About Creativity,” which explores his insightful Conversations about Creativity series. The talk will dive into the many interviews Brodnitz has conducted with “writers, musicians, visual artists, a clown, a choreographer, two cartoonists, a toy inventor, and a stand up comic.”

Bleek could be one hit away his whole career
As long as I’m alive, he’s a millionaire
And even if I die, he’s in my will somewhere
So he can just kick back and chill somewhere, oh yeah
He don’t even have to write rhymes
The Dynasty like my money last three lifetimes

“Bleek,” also known as Memphis Bleek (also known as Malik Thuston Cox), is one of the gents on Jay’s Roc-a-fella label who seems perpetually unable to crossover to mainstream success. Unlike most artists with such a problem, though, he has a fan (assumedly) in the form of one of the world’s biggest hip-hop artists. He’s featured on Jay’s albums, is featured on Jay’s tours, is featured in Jay’s videos, and is featured in Jay’s lyrics; all are great promotional vehicles.

However, the line seems to implicate the following:

• Bleek has never had a hit,
• Bleek is dependent on Jay for his success and wealth, and
• Bleek could bow out of the music game and it wouldn’t matter.

Granted, I’m reading into this a bit, but none of these implications, while possibly being factual, are what you (Bleek) would want to hear from a friend (Jay) or fan (also Jay). It makes the friendship appear as a pity party or a mercy friendship.

In other words, if all three of these statements I’m gleaning from the lyrics are true, why would you say this to your friend, much less your friend and all of the hip-hop listening world? Sure, Jay should be honest and constructive in his feedback to Bleek, but this doesn’t appear constructive to me. The first would appear petty, the second would appear obvious and demeaning, and the third would be downright hurtful and dismissive.

From the times where I met Jay while working at Def Jam, he always seemed like a personable, kind fellow. And artists on his label (now and past) seem to have a strong affinity to him (much in the same manner as his fans), which would suggest he doesn’t regularly demean his crew. So, again, why would he say this to someone with such loyalty?

• Could Jay not have recognized my interpretation of this lyric?
  I doubt it; Jay’s a smart guy, and constructs some very intricate ideas across clever wordplay. In other words, he shows all the signs of thinking through what he’s saying. His point of detailing how anyone (and anyone’s progeny) associated with him would be living large could be detailed in any number of alternative ways. That said, maybe he quickly wrote the verse, recorded it, thought about it, and figured it didn’t matter… it illustrated his point, and there were other lyrics to be recorded for other projects; you can’t live in the past.
• Is it tough love?
  Again, doubtful. Aside from this line, Jay appears to be a fan of Bleek, and (from what I’ve seen) hasn’t offered any other “time to fly from the comforts of my nest, young one” lines to Bleek.
• Is it hate?
  I can’t see how this is possible, as Jay has an incredibly large platform to hate from, and there isn’t any other evidence of him taking a shot at Bleek.
• Could Bleek have written the rhyme for Jay in some sort of bizarre homage to his patron?
  Possible, but strange. This seems the least likely answer yet.

As you can see, I can’t make sense of the line, but I wish that I could. And, while I would certainly enjoy the no-strings-attached patronage of someone like Jay-Z (you know, so I could “just kick back and chill somewhere”), I hope none of my friends would ever publicly call out any perceived lack of success on my part as a means to illustrate their wealth of success.

From a hater, it’s always welcome and expected; from a friend, it just seems downright confusing.

For those that don’t know, my dad is a Lutheran minister in Omaha, Nebraska (“Hometown of Heroes,” as I’m known to call it). As far back as I can remember (i.e. roughly age 4), my dad has been devoted to helping others in a means beyond his “day job” as a minister. Whether waking up at 5 in the winter to shovel snow off several of the elderly neighbors’ sidewalks (as well as ours) or organizing community fundraisers for hunger relief programs or helping fight an extradition case for a Namibian political refugee or partnering with the local consumer credit counseling service to help folks struggling with debt or volunteering time at the drug/alcohol recovery programs, my dad has always seemed to draw on a never-ending supply of energy when it comes to diving into efforts that could provide relief for someone else. (Important note: those examples are all taken from a 1-2 year period… not a cumulative record.)

And my mom is no slouch in that regard, either. She currently works as a case worker for the “Every Woman Matters” program in Nebraska (an effort to ensure low-income women can receive and proceed with cancer screenings). Before that, she worked to provide in-home services to the elderly and, before that, as a school nurse. She was always heavily involved in the Parent Teacher Association, started the Familyness program (which was used as a model for “healthy family education” programs nationwide), and recently created (and continues) a program to teach “English as a Second Language” to the Sudanese (displaced by the North-South civil war) and Mexican immigrant women in Omaha.

So, when I heard from my mom a couple weeks back that their church, Grace Evangelical Lutheran, was going to be honored for its efforts around social justice, I wasn’t too surprised. While the congregation is relatively small, they have (among many other efforts):

• embraced the local displaced Sudanese refugee community (providing facilities, fundraisers, and assistance navigating governmental organizations),
• host an exercise- and health-focused neighborhood non-profit my dad kickstarted (Interfaith Health Service), and
• run an after-school “Kids at Work” program for low-income youth (wherein the students establish a savings account populated with earnings from their community gardening work).

And, while the award belongs to the church and the good folks there that joined in, pushed through, and continue with these efforts, I can’t help but be proud of my folks particularly.

This past week, my parents and several members of the congregation went to Lincoln to receive the award: the 2009 Art Palmer Micah 6:8 Justice Ministry Award. It was presented by the ELCA in honor of a Nebraskan who’d championed the cause of justice for the under-served populations. They’ve both received several awards in the past, but I’d like to think this one carried a bit more weight. Aside from carrying my name, the award recognizes the efforts that seem built into their DNA and are of paramount importance to their daily lives.

True to Micah 6:8 (paraphrased, “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly”), my dad posted but a fleeting line of text and a group photo to let people know of the award.

I, on the other hand, relish praise and attention (“I’m sure you’re already well familiar with Laaker.com,” I often pepper into my discussions.); as such, I hope someone else out there will see some of the great efforts my folks have been doing in the Omaha community for others. They both truly continue to inspire me every day, and it’s rewarding to see that their contagious efforts were recognized amongst all the great things going on across Nebraska.

I argued (very convincingly) that uploading photos and geotagging them were for suckers. They are both important tasks, but tasks I had no interest in. “Think how much time you spend downloading photos from your card, uploading them, and geotagging them (and trying to get Flickr to recognize a very clear, accurate address). And then think about 10 others things you could be doing. Including taking other photos,” I said.

Graves countered that tackling menial tasks best left to machines/drones (and the associated slowness and inefficiency) was the better user experience, or so I remember his argument.

Unwilling to leave it at that, I pressed the point: “I’m willing to make a wager. I would propose we each take a picture of the other’s flash memory card, upload and geotag it. The person with all 3 of these tasks accomplished first wins.” Excited about proving his approach, Graves took the bet.

Roughly 30 seconds later, my photo of Zach’s card was live to the world. I took an additional 10 seconds or so to add a title to the image as a courtesy.

Zach’s photo, however, never even managed to make it up to Flickr. (It should have appeared somewhere between “DAS 5” and the photo of my Yahoo! star.) Somewhere in that long, inefficient chain of tasks described earlier, Graves decided he had better things to do… which was true.

Just about any task other than downloading, uploading, and geotagging your photos is better than downloading, uploading, and geotagging your photos, including naming and otherwise organizing such photos. Leave rote mechanical tasks to the robots and Wifi-enabled, auto-geotagging and uploading flash memory cards that handle such tasks so gracefully.

So, the point of this story? Make a good office bet. Listen to a little Kenny Rogers. Curl up with a long-winded but intriguing
H.P. Lovecraft tale. And, pick up a special edition Eye-Fi 4GB card on the cheap, whose tiny wireless robots will do the job of which the Kingston card (and its owners) could only dream.

With this approach in mind, I’d like to propose a solution that fits within this vein: a standardized means for publishers (i.e. anyone producing Web content) to expose their Application offerings to users.

Applications are all the rage now. Facebook kicked off the trend, Apple came in with killer iPhone Apps, and Yahoo!, Google, MySpace, and others all have App offerings, too. As such, many publishers have Apps in many flavors (i.e. platforms), but may not actively promote them around their site. Or, if they do, they don’t all consistently feature and talk about Apps in a manner that helps users know where to go to find out if their favorite site offers an App.

This problem, though, isn’t unique to Apps. It was a similar problem for RSS feeds when they emerged several years back. And the solution proposed then (and since implemented) would seem to work equally well for Apps: provide an autodiscovery tag for Apps in an HTML document’s head element. Once folks begin adding App Autodiscovery tags to their pages, browser makers (such as Firefox, WebKit, Opera, Internet Explorer, and others) and other software vendors (such as Yahoo! Toolbar, Apple’s iPhone version of Safari, etc.) can look at how they’d like to visualize such information (if at all). (This type of solution has been extended to content other than RSS, such as FOAF and Sitemaps.)

An example of how App Autodiscovery tags could be visualized in a browser.

Why do this? There are a number of reasons:

• A common standard for App autodiscovery will allow browser and software vendors to develop innovative means of exposing related App content;
• App Autodiscovery won’t negatively impact users or browsers that don’t understand the tag; it will just be ignored.
• App Autodiscovery is easy to integrate;

To prove the last point, the code for such an effort is simple:

<link rel="alternate" type="app/facebook" title="The New York Times News Quiz" href="http://apps.facebook.com/nytquiz" />

The type attribute could be populated with any series of attribute values (which would need to become normalized and approved MIME types), such as:

• app/opensocial
• app/facebook
• app/yap
• app/iphone

Additional title and href values would define the App’s unique name and location, which could tell a user where to use/install the Application in the appropriate App platform.

So, with this thinking in place, App Autodiscovery code could begin to be integrated into sites today in the following fashion (using my friend and colleague Matt Lock’s App: Minsa):


<html>
  <head>
   <title>...</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="app/yap"
    title="Minsa"
    href="http://apps.yahoo.com/-6lOOCT7a" />
  </head>
  <body>
   <!-- the web page's contents -->
  </body>
</html>


Adding this one line of code (per app per platform) within your website’s head element can make relevant App discovery much easier for people in the places they already have an interest (i.e. the places they visit). What do others think? Let me know if you know of alternate/better solutions to address this issue.

* For those unsure of what I’m referring to, the Semantic Web is an effort to provide structure and additional information around content on the Web. Why? Because most content on the Web is understandable to its readers, but not to computers. As such, you can discern that an article online is talking about an event (like a concert at a certain place at a certain time), but your calendar software can’t recognize it as such. Therefore, you need to manually “rebuild” such event info in your calendar, which breaks its relationship to the online article; if the article was updated, you wouldn’t know, and your calendar would be out of date. These disconnects happen all over the Web today, but could be significantly reduced via concerted efforts by publishers to enhance their Web content with semantic markup (which in turn would open their content up to many inventive possibilities that are today exceedingly difficult).

For more information about the Semantic Web, check out the W3C’s efforts (as well as the community-driven Microformats efforts) to see how content on today’s Web pages can be enhanced to support this model.

The book features two of Laaker’s photographs from a recent visit to Stockton:

Bank of Stockton building

Fox Theater Marquee

These two photographs by Laaker were discovered on Flickr by Cherbo Publishing Group, the book’s publisher, during its production.

“What better opportunity for Stockton to show off its better features than to feature a showing of some of Laaker’s shots?” said Micah Laaker. “Cherbo’s acquisition of these two images for this publication speaks to the quality of the publication, and, in turn, to Stockton itself for approving such imagery. To them both, I say, ‘Stay classy, Stockton.'” (It was uncertain if
Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy was playing in the background during Laaker’s comments. Regardless, Laaker enjoyed his trip to Stockton, which did indeed feature some beautifully restored buildings.)

Commissioned by the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce, “Stockton: Renewed, Revitalized, Redefined” was written by Anne Gonzales. Gonzales was the former business and agriculture reporter for The Record.

More news about the book can found at The Record, the Chamber of Commerce, and at Amazon.com.

However, and this may sound strange, I’m not always interested in what I’m interested in. After getting my fill of news on all things data visualization, design, Mac, tiny houses, cryptozoology, App platforms, social media, deals, foreign policy, StarCraft, and Paul Simon, I sometimes wonder what other folks are reading.

And that’s when I turn to Newspyle.

Newspyle is a simple, 3-columned website that shows the latest news bubbled up by others (who I generally don’t know) on Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. I’m able to see, at a glance, what the rest of the world is finding interesting. Obviously, these three sites aren’t truly representative of the antithesis of all things Micah. (There’s still plenty of Mac, design, and web-oriented news.) But there is a fair bit of content I otherwise wouldn’t see… and wouldn’t bother perusing each of these sites (or their associated feeds) to filter such gems.

Only problem is, when viewed on the iPhone, the Newspyle site was hard to work with. It’s 3-column approach, which worked well on laptops and desktops, became hard to navigate and read on a smaller screen. The often-limited bandwidth of the phone, too, posed a hurdle when all the Digg links sent users off to Digg first (instead of directly to the story you were interested in).

Because of this, I recently built my first iPhone Web App: Newspyle for iPhone. And all it took was 2 hours. Actually, it took 20 minutes to make the App. But then I needed an extra hour and 40 minutes to troubleshoot some nuances that weren’t quite right initially. I did all of this using 4 things:

1. Newspyle (for the idea),
2. Dapper (to extract content from Digg, Reddit, and Delicious),
3. SimplePie (to parse the 3 sites’ RSS feeds and print the content into the App),
4. WebApp.net (which, somewhat ironically, isn’t available at http://webapp.net/ but provides the iPhone UI appearance).

The whole process was remarkably easy, as the time allotment suggests. Of course, it helped that the idea was already baked. And that tools like Dapper, SimplePie, and WebApp.net exist. And, are free.

Even more exciting, though, than simply building the App was that it made it (in some way, shape, or form) into the actual product. On a whim, I emailed Kunal Anand (the good fellow behind Newspyle) to tell him about what I put together (and attached the “working” code). Instead of a cease-and-desist or a thanks-but-no-thanks, Kunal seemed genuinely appreciative of the work, and pushed a similar but superior version live to the public. (I don’t know the details of Kunal’s reworking of the code, but it runs much faster, has better state memory, and uses a battle-tested backend solution.)

As such, now any visitor to the Newspyle site using an iPhone is automatically redirected to Newspyle for iPhone. And now, hopefully, more folks will get to enjoy (in an easier-to-read and lighter memory footprint) the collective wisdom of the crowds (at Digg, Reddit, and Delicious) while on-the-go.

All in all, this was a great introduction to iPhone development, and my (little) effort made things easier for me. I now get a much quicker browsing experience at Newspyle while on my iPhone, and hopefully others will, too. I again extend my thanks to Kunal for so graciously accepting the work of a fan; the Web is a wonderful place when folks can interact, contribute, and extend in this manner.

(PS: If you want a great way to use Google Reader on the iPhone, aside from their iPhone-optimized site, be sure to check out Byline by Phantom Fish.)

The Sceptical Futuryst, a blog sketching out the ideas and impacts possible in future scenarios, ran an interview with video director Micah Laaker entitled “Surveillance Supreme.”

The interview centers around the backstory of the animation, which continues to win awards and praise 4 years after its creation. It has made its way around of various film festivals (particularly resfest|10 and Media That Matters 5) and online memes.

The video can be viewed below, via YouTube, or on the ACLU site.

Laaker has created a number of interactive media for the ACLU aside from the Pizza video, including their 100 Greatest Hits, Major Supreme Court Decisions on Women’s Rights, and the Katrina Aftermath at Orleans Parish Prison.

With the rumored Apple TV-minus-the-box-plus-the-TV unit days from being announced, I wanted to add one more set of thoughts to his before any such unveiling.

Mike was one of the folks behind Yahoo! Mash, a testbed for some of Yahoo!’s social efforts soon to be released. In my mind, Mash’s key feature was the ability for anyone to create a profile for someone who hadn’t yet joined the service. The thinking was that some folks just don’t want to spend the time setting things up… but if someone already did all the work, why not? (And, as someone who has had to setup innumerable electronics and computer purchases for others, I can attest to the success of such efforts; knock out most of the setup hassles, and you’ve got a happy user you’d otherwise have never had.)

In a similar vein, why not offer the ability for users to setup and customize software profiles for others on the Apple TV? There’s a reason people still joke about how hard it is for their parents to setup a VCR: configuring home electronics is never as easy as you’d like. Mac users are generally well known for their evangelization of the Apple platform; why not give them an opportunity to prove it?

My thinking is this: Apple should provide a Mac andWindows application (or Web app) that allows a user to specify the following settings:

• WiFi settings
• iTunes Library pairing
• Television model (with supported resolutions)
• Cable provider and channel lineup (Apple TV doesn’t use this now, but if they ever want to tackle PVR, this would be good info to get)
• YouTube username
• Flickr username (and usernames of Contacts to track)
• MobileMe username
• Slideshow settings
• Podcast subscriptions

Once entered, the application can generate a patchstick disc image and load it directly onto a USB thumb drive, much in the same way that Boxee’s and XBMC’s patchstick is created. With this USB drive, a user could then plug it into their Apple TV, restart the unit, and have their settings injected in a matter of minutes. Even if this were just for individuals to do for themselves (i.e. not to help setup someone else’s Apple TV), the time (and frustration) savings would be considerable.

With that simple application, Apple could take the hassle out of an already-somewhat-hassle-free, living room electronics experience. And, with that, take on a bigger home entertainment marketshare.

Fortunately, no one waited for Apple to create the Boxee patchstick to extend the Apple TV. For those capable, why not create a patchstick creator to do just this?

Or so my theory goes.

Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand kiosk service this past January.

Also during that time, Apple has released two versions of the iPhone, one of its biggest mainstream successes to date. Unlike the Apple TV, though, Apple provided iPhone users with an App Store: a means of extending the device with 3rd-party-developed Apps.

These Apps are developed somewhat differently than those for the Mac desktop. Namely, rather than the keyboard and mouse standards of yore, they are tuned to leverage the device’s alternate input mechanisms (multi-touch display, limited visible real estate, accelerometer, gyroscope, location-aware GPS/WiFi, Bluetooth, camera, and cellular connection) and alternate environments (indoors/outdoors, small physical screen, one-handed interaction, noisy surroundings, varied lighting, etc.).

Because of this shift in development, Apps developed for the iPhone (in my argument) are more in line with Apps that would be useful for the Apple TV (and not desktop Apps). The Apple TV currently ships with an Apple remote control that took some cues from the iPod: it has a 4-direction clickwheel and two buttons (Play and Menu). This limited set of possible interactions generally works well for the TV, but would work terribly for desktop Apps (where users are used to multiple inputs: 104-plus keys on a keyboard and a dual-click, scroll-wheel mouse). Anyone, in fact, who’s had to enter their 32-character WiFi password on the Apple TV unit using the directional clicker and Play button knows such interaction is painful; what is easy on the computer desktop is very difficult six feet away from the screen with limited input controls.

Apple clearly knows this.

To date, Apple’s software updates have added very few Apps to the Apple TV. Those they do provide are primarily restricted to “browsing” functions (i.e. tasks that involve simple directional scrolling and a couple clicks). Aside from browsing/playing video content, you can browse/play music, photos, and podcasts. In the few cases where the user needs to do more than browse or play, “keyboard entry” is limited to activities such as entering search terms for podcasts or supplying a username and password. Why? Because moving across a virtual, on-screen keyboard one click at a time with the Apple remote is time-consuming, painful, and so not “Apple-like.”

However, Apple has begun to tie the iPhone and Apple TV together already to simplify such a complex interaction. By releasing the “Remote” Application on the iTunes App Store at launch, Apple now provides Apple TV users an alternate means of accessing a virtual keyboard: rather than click with the Apple Remote, users can instead access the iPhone’s virtual keyboard (far from perfect, but light years better than the Apple TV’s beast). Aside from just keyboard entry, the “Remote” App also provides alternate menu access to controlling the selection and playback of video and audio content on the TV.

With one tiny App, Apple unveiled a powerful connection between the two non-Mac devices. Suddenly, users have two devices that stand tall on their own, but, by joining together, add up to be greater than their sum. The result? Giant, hi-def HDTVs as the display; Web-connected computer capable of handling concurrent App tasks and video signal decoding; a remote that has a multi-touch display, accelerometer, gyroscope, camera, and cellular connection; and (maybe most importantly) a compact format that fits well in a home living room entertainment center.

Because of this possibility, I would predict Apple begins to do 2 things:

1. allow developers to create rich, Internet-connected, iPhone-controllable Apps for the Apple TV using an extension of the iPhone SDK, and
2. distribute Apps to the Apple TV using the iPhone App Store (potentially with a filter for TV-only Apps).

So, aside from creating a cool home entertainment hydra, why would Apple enable the iPhone SDK for development of Apple TV Applications? I would posit several reasons:

• Name:
  I’ll lead with my weakest argument: the iTunes App Store is called the iTunes App Store, not the iPhone App Store. This would seem to suggest Apple is keeping the door open to distribute Apps to platforms beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Greed:
  $30 million was earned in the first month of the App Store’s release, with $70 million more the following month. Six million total Apple TV units are predicted to be in homes by end of 2008 compared to the 12 million iPhones in the market now. This would suggest a theoretical $25 million/month for the yet-to-be-supported Apple TV unit. Do I think that’s unrealistic? Sure. But even 1/10th of that figure would suggest an attractive revenue stream.
• Development Environment:
  Both Mac and iPhone development use Apple’s Xcode. And while the iPhone uses it’s own OS, the Apple TV uses a customized OS X. Apple TV App development could leverage UI controls and the simplified focus of the iPhone while having access to OS X’s amazing developer palette.
• Patent Mining:
  Apple filed a patent two years ago suggesting some big changes to the product: the Apple TV as a lightweight widget/application platform. The thinking therein appears to suggest that app-like widgets could enhance a user’s viewing experience (whether by facilitating live chat with other viewers, providing contextual information against the current feature ala VH1’s Popup Video, etc.), and describes a number of possible widgets: Weather, Stocks, World Clock, Sports, and Video Chat.

Because of these points, I believe there’s a strong chance Apple will further connect the iPhone and Apple TV. Or, Apple could replace the Apple TV entirely, and come out with a killer Mac Mini/Apple TV-hybrid unit. One generally never knows what Steve Jobs has up his sleeve until his Tuesday announcements…

(Side note: this isn’t a new idea… several more-informed folks have suggested similar ideas in the past. AppleInsider proposed the Apple TV as a “casual gaming” device, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog has been clamoring for Apple TV Apps for some time. Update: The Inquisitr just proposed a similar call for an Apple TV App Store.)

Inquisitor
Download Inquisitor | Previous recommendation that must be recommended again
Aside from far-faster page-loading performance, Inquisitor makes Safari the one-and-only browser choice on the Mac. (Don’t get me wrong: Firefox is fast, open source, and worth having on your machine. Safari’s just much, much faster, and better integrated into the Mac.) The plug-in, now financed by Yahoo!, modifies Safari’s top-right search box in the following ways:

• Change the default Search provider
• Adds auto-complete
• Adds search term suggestions
• Shows the first 3-5 results for your search in a bubble with a preview
• Allows you to add customizable links to alternate search engines (mine target my Delicious.com links, Amazon, Google Images, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Yahoo!’s intranet)

To top it off, it is super fast. It’s free, and very easy to install. Do not wait.

If you use a Mac, this should be the very first piece of software you install.

Quicksilver
Download Quicksilver | New to this list
I fought this for a long time, and I now regret doing so. Quicksilver is so many things, but at its basic core it provides a time-saving application and document launcher… via keystrokes. While the mouse and other inputs (like trackpads, Wacom tablets, etc.) provide precise pixel-level control over the cursor, the keyboard is undisputedly one of the fastest data entry devices for all things text. I mention this, only as I had previously argued it was faster for me to leave whatever I was doing, move the cursor down to the Dock, and click on an App I wanted to open. Unfortunately, I was wrong on two accounts:

1. Moving my mouse down to the OS X Dock, finding the App, clicking it, and then moving back up to the newly-launched App’s location takes a fair bit of time and thought.
2. Many times, the App I want isn’t in the Dock, so I either need to pollute my Dock with all App possibilities I may at some point want or invariably have to switch to the Finder, find the App by clicking through folders structures, double-click it, etc.

With Quicksilver, I simply hit Ctrl-Space, begin typing the App’s name I want, and hit Return as soon as I see it enter focus in the middle of my screen. My cursor stayed put, my fingers did what they were already doing, my Dock is now sparse and very easy to scan, and I can limitlessly access all Apps with roughly five keystrokes (3 of those being Control, Space, and Return).

Further, after seeing Mozilla Labs release Ubiquity for Firefox, I’m further convinced that these keystroke command lines are best suited for language-driven actions than cursor/touch interactions… and will hopefully become more commonplace.

1Password
Download 1Password | Replaces Pastor
1Password is a life-saver. While OS X has a built-in Keychain application which remembers OS-level passwords, 1Password reaches deep into all Web browser Apps (such as Safari, Firefox, Opera, WebKit, Fluid, etc.) to extend password (and contact info form) remembrance. What does that mean? Instead of collecting all your passwords on a piece of paper or an online notepad, 1Password automatically collects all the forms you fill out online and makes them one-click away from being resubmitted later on. These passwords then can be synced between multiple Macs (via their free my.1Password.com service) and iPhones (via their free 1Password iPhone App).

As added features, it can generate very secure passwords for you, remember multiple accounts (if you share the same computer with several people who use Yahoo! or Gmail), and can store and access non-Web site passwords (such as software serial numbers, frequent flier accounts, or frequent shopper perks).

Now, all you need to remember is the one password you use for 1Password.

Fluid
Download Fluid | New to this list
Fluid doesn’t make sense to most people I discuss it with, unfortunately, but it is among my favorite Apps. Fluid lets you take any Web page and turn it into its own App. “Why,” most of my friends ask, “would you want to do this?” Safari, Firefox, and other Web browsers all seem to get sluggish and/or crash right when you need to check email or perform a quick task. When that happens, everything you have open inside of them is frozen. This isn’t a big deal if you’re checking the New York Times or another news site. It is, however, a big deal when you use some Web pages like Apps themselves (think: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Mint, WordPress, etc.).

Fluid, in essence, turns your favorite sites into standalone Apps. This gibes you some of the many benefits Apps have over Web pages in OS X (such as new message count for email or new items for RSS feeds). Each App created by Fluid runs in a protected instance of Safari, meaning that if Safari slows down, your App doesn’t (and vice versa). Lastly, you also get Growl notifications, Greasemonkey extensions, and much more.

WordService
Download | New to this list
I still am surprised that Apple supplies a built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus, but not these tools. And, further, that someone provides all of these free-of-charge. And, further, that no one seems to know about these.

DEVONtechnologies has made an OS X plugin (called a “Service”) that allows you to do the following to text you have selected in most Apps:

1. Convert to Initial caps of sentences
2. Convert to Initial caps of words
3. Convert to uppercase (all caps)
4. Convert to lowercase
5. Convert between straight quotes and smart quotes
6. Get statistics (letter, word, and line count)
7. Convert between Mac, Windows, and Unix line endings
8. Sort lines ascending/descending
9. Shift left or right
10. and plenty more…

Needless to say, if you ever deal with text (whether in email, Word docs, or browser form fields, this Service will be worth an installation. You can always access it then, too, by selecting text, opening your App’s menu (i.e. “Safari” menu in the Safari App), navigating to the Services item, and then opening Convert, Format, or Insert.

Adium
Download Adium | Replaces Proteus
Previously, I recommended Proteus for multi-service instant messaging; I’ve long since converted to Adium. First, Proteus is no longer under development. Second, Adium has been squashing bugs and adding features at an amazing clip. You can not only chat across the major services (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, GoogleTalk, etc.), but you can now chat with Facebook friends, too. It taps into OS X’s built-in Address Book for contacts, and is very customizable.

AppFresh
Download AppFresh | New to this list
Far from the last App to download is AppFresh. This software should be built into Apple’s Software Update mechanism, but until it is, there’s AppFresh. It scans your Mac, lists all the software you have, lets you know which are out-of-date, and (best yet) lets you update those you select without leaving this App. Keeping up-to-date was never so easy.

Other Recommendations
The following Apps have been useful to me, although they are far from the standard, daily-use fare of the aforementioned Apps:

• FFXporter
  Free, lightweight plugin for iPhoto which lets you upload your selected photos to Flickr. (This has been a long time coming.)
• Secrets
  Exposes numerous OS X software “hidden” preferences for quick manipulation. Many similar Apps charge $20 for this; Secrets is free, and allows users to quickly add other prefs to the system as they’re discovered.
• Punakea
  Tiny, lightweight App which lets you quickly tag files (ala Flickr and del.icio.us) in the Finder.
• RapidoWrite
  Create shorthand for text snippets, ala TextExpander… but $30 less (i.e. free).

I’ve been trying to get my extended family to use Amazon’s Wish List system for years to better manage gift lists for the holidays, so this is a particularly welcome addition. Inevitably, duplicate gifts are purchased, as there was no central place to manage non-Amazon gifts (such as a Sears Craftsman tool or gift certificate to a local restaurant) in the past.

Now, however, anything that can be found online (such as a Craigslist ad, eBay listing, photo from a news site, etc.) can be turned into an entry on your Amazon Wish List. Using the new Amazon.com Universal Wish List button, an object can be flagged from the browser toolbar in seconds.

As a side note, Steve Rubel points out that “it’s conceivable that this could become a social commerce feature over time given Amazon’s popular Associates program.” This brings up an interesting idea: if Amazon can now “collect” objects/items it doesn’t sell, track whether they’ve been purchased (and by whom), handle transactions with 3rd-party merchants, and offer “affiliate” (or referral) fees, why not extend the program to broker other 3rd-party affiliate promotions? Personally, I far prefer Amazon’s Affiliates program to LinkShare, Commission Junction, and others before it, in terms of ease of sign up, management, link building, and reporting. Why not take the next step by plugging in the 3rd-party affiliate programs, thus further extending Amazon’s ownership of the online shopping experience?

I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some big omissions that would impede regular usage for site administrators… at least from my standpoint.

• Dashboard functions
  As readers here know, I don’t post every day. I do, however, very regularly check my WordPress Dashboard. The Dashboard wraps up basic stats, such as the five most recent comments, incoming links, number of new unapproved comments, and WordPress news for the package itself (and 3rd-party plugins).

  I find this data invaluable to know if there’s anything I need to take action on (such as marking a new comment as ‘approved’ or ‘spam’) or learning about a security exploit.

• Global Drafts
  The second-most popular task for me in WordPress is creating and editing a draft post on the server. It generally takes me several revisions before I post a “post” here. (This one, for instance, has taken 10+ edits over 1.5 weeks.)

  Unfortunately, though, the iPhone WordPress app only can edit and save local drafts (i.e. those on the iPhone itself). This is probably the biggest deal-breaker for me. I don’t want to write and edit on my iPhone, as the keyboard is so awkward. I would, however, as it makes it convenient to drop in a quick edit or two, or get started on a new idea. But, preferably, I’d take a full, non-finger-crippling, physical keyboard experience over the on-screen, cramped digital keyboard. Because of this, I wouldn’t now dream of starting a post on the iPhone knowing I couldn’t switch back to the desktop keyboard later.

  Maybe one day Apple will allow Bluetooth keyboards to pair with the iPhone. (Maybe even starting with their own keyboards, in fact!) Until then, this app will just serve as a monitoring and quick editing environment.

  (Side note: It appears this issue may be larger than that of this app. I’ve noticed similar drawbacks plague ecto and MarsEdit, too. Anyone know why this is, and/or a workaround?)

• Links (add, remove, order)
  The iPhone has a number of built-in controls and UI elements for creating and managing lists. WordPress, too, has great built-in support for Links which populate a blog’s Blogroll section. Why not blend the best of both worlds? List management for your blog using the iPhone’s easy list management UI features? It sounds delightful.
• Widget addition, order, removal
  Similar to Link management, the ability to re-order, customize, and enable/disable Widgets for WordPress. Honestly, re-ordering widgets using the WordPress Web-based manager is rather awkward… having used the iPhone’s list control UI before, I imagine I’d prefer handling all Widget activity on the iPhone altogether.
• Plugin control and updates
  Plugins are well-known to cause performance issues for some WP blogs, and occasionally they can cause sites to come to a screeching halt. Being able to toggle a plugin on and off remotely would allow site administrators to quickly re-enable a site simply by flipping a plugin off (and/or back on). Further, WordPress now allows most plugins to be updated (when updates are offered) via the Web interface. As such, being able to click a couple links to bring all your plugins up-to-date would be very useful.
• Run backups
  The thing about backups is: you never think to backup your files till its too late… why not just offer the “Save to server” and “Email backup” options (sans “Download to your computer” due to limited iPhone storage opportunities)?
• Stats
  Last but not least, the WordPress Stats plugin has become invaluable to me. I’m a big fan of Google Analytics (who significantly raised the bar on visualizing web usage data several years ago), but there are few times that I head over to the Google site to check out how my blog is doing. The WordPress Stats plugin gives me my most basic visualizations (such as visitors over time, top posts, top searches, and most active) right on the Dashboard. It’s not a 3rd-party plugin, as its made by Automattic (the folks behind WP itself and Akismet), so no (legal) reason not to include in this package.

  I know the plugin currently uses Flash to render its chart, but I’d happily deal with a static, cached PNG or GIF if that got me some level of site monitoring via the app.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I understand I’m looking at a 1.0 release, not a 2.x or 3.x version. Many of the features I’m describing are fine to release after supporting basic posting functionality. Further, the app is free… which means the good folks at Automattic dropped at least a benjamin simply to offer freeloaders (like myself and all other WordPress user) a means of managing our blogs on the go. (So, to the good folks developing this app, “thank you.”)

Automattic has been kind enough to provide a list of upcoming bug fixes and features for the app. I didn’t see any of my ideas already listed there, but don’t doubt that as time passes, the app will become considerably more usable.

What features of the app do you find missing? And/or invaluable while on the go?

Update: Daniel Jalkut, author of MarsEdit, kindly offered a solution to the issue of Global Drafts, which ended up serving as a great workaround. (Thanks, Daniel! Anyone else know how to solve the remaining open 6 features?)

First, why would Kanye be defending (or “riding with”) Soulja Boy? And second, why would Kanye (who’s got something against everybody) say he’s got nothing against “nobody?” Neither made any sense to me. I had to read, and I’m glad I did.

Before I continue, I should note: the subject matter of the videos below is not for everybody. And by not everybody, I mean most anybody, particularly not for those who don’t enjoy hip-hop, braggadocio, considerable amounts of cursing, disrespect, and mockery. Also: laughter.

Back to the issue, Kanye fired off an opinion after watching some YouTube videos documenting the latest hip-hop Internet beef: Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy Tell Em. Turns out, Ice-T (the West Coast gangsta rapper once known for “O.G. Original Gangster” and “Cop Killer” and now known as Detective Fin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) decided to call out last year’s Internet and radio phenom Soulja Boy Tell Em (only known for last summer’s “Superman (Crank Dat)” dance and track) as the single-handed reason hip-hop is dead.

Ice-T’s Soulja Boy tirade

Bold words from T. Well, actually, bolder (and far more offensive) words were used, as well. Soulja Boy took some haranguing comments from Iceberg Slim on a mixtape drop promoting his new Urban Legends album. Soulja Boy heard the comments, grabbed a couple friends, hopped in front of their Mac’s high-resolution iSight camera, and responded as high school students do best: with incessant snaps about how irrelevant Ice-T was to anyone under the age of 50. Soulja Boy derides T for 7+ minutes, utilizing a Wikipedia article to fuel the flames.

He calls him out by name, references his East Coast-birthplace, 1950’s birthyear (in which he says folks were “still driving in wood cars”), and caps it with the classic “you should change your name to Lemonade cause you sweet” line. (“Sweet,” in this case, is suggesting that T’s image is a bit soft.)

Soulja Boy’s response

Ice-T, in turn, utilizes a 1980’s camcorder (likely VHS or Betamax) to capture his video retort. Unfortunately, the reply backfires, and for multiple reasons:

1. T appears in what could (at best) be described as a nouveau-riche-inspired retirement community,
2. T appears in a dated sports jersey (which was popular several years back),
3. T repeatedly apologizes and then berates SB (and others) in a passive-aggressive mess of thoughts,
4. T moves in and out of the camera’s viewfinder in a semi-nervous, “I’ve never done this before” posturing that doesn’t suggest a familiarity with self-published videos,
5. T repeatedly refers to “hip-hop” as being the one who will deal Soulja Boy justice for producing “garbage,” rather than himself.

Topping it off, Ice brings his son into the fray to talk trash at the end of the tape, too. All in all, an out-dated, out-gunned response using a medium he didn’t seem comfortable leveraging.

Ice-T’s response

So what does Soulja Boy do? Unleash the deathblow: a 4-minute, 55-second cartoon lambasting T as a “dinosaur-turned-gangsta rapper,” hypocrite, bad dancer, jealous has-been and crybaby. While crudely rendered, the animation repeatedly mocks T’s efforts at relevance to today’s market, and is highlighted a couple times with overdubbed, early 80’s Ice-T breakdancing footage.

Soulja Boy’s animated response

The animation, while juvenile and repetitive, proved Soulja Boy the clear winner. Having already lampooned T (particularly by having to look up T on Wikipedia to even know who he was) with 1.5-million-plus views of his video response, he upped the ante by having a cadre of folks write a script, animate it, and further shame one of the godfathers of West Coast rap.

Wanting to appear timely and relevant, Iceberg instead lived up to his moniker: slow, old, monolithic, and (in this global warming era) fading fast. SB took the beef from the rhyme arena (where Ice-T could have destroyed him in seconds) into a Web 2.0 world (where SB had already proven a grassroots, rags-to-riches success). And T sadly went along for the ride.

While watching that first Soulja Boy video, I was reminded of a wildlife documentary showing how prides of lions pass the mantle of leadership between generations. The elder lion is taunted by the younger upstart, who doesn’t quite seem to know his own power. The elder lion takes the taunts for a period of time, snapping at the young buck, but eventually hits a breaking point.

Of course, once he hits that point, he strikes, but cannot match the agility of the younger cat. Wounded, he is forced out from the pack, and left alone to die in isolation.

The saddest connection of this analogy is that Soulja Boy is hardly more than a flash in the pan, and many inside hip-hop culture would argue he’s not one of theirs (Kanye West respectfully excluded). Nonetheless, Ice-T got frustrated, picked on someone much, much younger than himself, and somehow managed to get schooled in front of the whole pride.

Certainly, he’ll retain some respect for his past achievements, but hip-hop is an entertainment-based industry… and the entertainment industry rarely focuses on or subsidizes once-was-hot artists. What today’s kids want is generally what today’s kids get.

With this beef now over, it’s pretty clear: if today’s kids didn’t previously know who Ice-T was (without checking Wikipedia), they certainly will now associate him with three things:

1. being old,
2. being sweet, and
3. being in possession of a museum-grade camcorder that used vacuum tubes to get its video out to the Internet.

Game over.

Shortly before I left the halls of Island Def Jam to come to Yahoo!, the company began promoting little-known Atlanta artist Lloyd on their Murder Inc. sub-label. After one spin, I smelled a stinker, and said so.

“No, no, no. Lloyd’s gonna be hot,” I heard.

Today, at a corporate office’s coffee bar in Silicon Valley, what did I see? A Lloyd “How We Do It” CD… offered not as a Lloyd CD, but rather (and rather mockingly at that) as a drink coaster.

It feels good being right every now and again.

Quick review: I wish I hadn’t committed to write this review. I find Internet Blackout to be offensive to those who enjoy comics, the Internet, and learning.

Full review: I’m a fan of O’Reilly. As a general rule, I’ve found their titles to be authoritative, practical, and a great reference when coding. I’m a daily reader of the O’Reilly Radar blog, and find Tim O’Reilly, the company’s founder, to have an accurate read on the technology industry’s pulse.

But, somehow, some way, this book happened into being under the label of O’Reilly. And I’m confused. Because, quite plainly, this comic is a mess from top to bottom. It has none of the trappings of the quality or consistency I’ve come to expect from the big O.

It sounds like its creators had a noble intent: “Hackerteen teaches young readers about basic computing and Internet topics, including the potential for victimization. The book is also ideal for parents and teachers who want their children and students to understand the risks of using the Internet and the proper ways to behave online.” Hackerteen is a real organization, with a similar mission, and the book is apparently a product of the group’s efforts.

As a new father myself, I can appreciate wanting to provide some guidance to the youth about online behavior and risks. I just can’t see how this book will do that, and I say that for two reasons.

First, as a comic book, Internet Blackout is not up to par. The reasons are myriad, but here are a select few:

• The story line hops six times on one page in several cases (and repeatedly throughout the book) without some sort of visual signaling, leaving me wondering what is happening page-by-painful-page.
• The artwork is downright sloppy. (Truly, “sloppy” is a kind representation… see page 57 for but one example of degenerative pencilling, crude coloring, and widely varying inking techniques… not to mention poor understanding of human anatomy.)
• Is this a superhero book? Or a book about gifted teens? Because what I see throughout the book confuses me greatly. Outlandish uniforms that even cosplay kids would decry as unimaginative (yet remain more believable than some of the X-Men 3 costumes) populate the same Bizarroverse as the Richie Rich-esque grandmother and the Mayberry-dwelling dad who changes appearance with his every appearance.

Second, as a story in general, I find it speaking down to its audience. We all remember that fateful, humorless time when our parents tried to emulate “the way these kids talk today.” The language was stilted, over-emphasized, and beyond awkward. Or trying to sound culturally aware by referencing yesterday’s star? In many ways, that describes the story line at large, as well as the conversations within Hackerteen. The tone is preachy, the language a bit off (When was the last time you heard anyone, much less someone under 30, use the term “cretin?”), and the drama overblown (soldiers on the battlefield in Iraq are somehow crippled by an Internet attack that doesn’t cripple the cable news channels from broadcasting).

Further, the book’s ending unravels into a series of disconnected vignettes. I’m not sure if those last pages were truly wrapping up the same story line I had been trudging through for the previous 90+ pages, but I didn’t care to double check. I was just happy to be done.

All told, this comic seems to suffer in the same vein as the design and appearance of many open-source, community-driven software projects; the result is a patchwork of unequal, disjointed contributions that you want to cheer on for its effort but would never recommend.

If you’re under 20, though, and reading this and have read the book, please let me know. Maybe a) Internet Blackout really does speak to its target audience, and b) that audience doesn’t pick apart the quality of the artwork. In the meantime, I’ll hope this was an anomaly in the O’Reilly publishing empire.

According to Wikipedia’s definition of “animal cracker,” they are “crackers in the shapes of animals… They are like crackers due to the way they are made, with layered dough, however the use of sweetened dough gives them the cookie taste and consistency.”

Tellingly, the definition also notes: “There is debate about whether or not Animal Crackers are actually crackers or cookies.”

And this is where I come in. See, I have this very debate roughly every two weeks. Someone will invariably see one of my animal cracker “snackin’ buckets,” and say, “Man, I love animal crackers, too! I remember those boxes as a kid with the circus animals, and…” And that’s where I stop them.

Nabisco’s Barnum’s Animals (Crackers) are far from animal crackers. Sure, they have animals on them, share a similar form factor, and even share similar packaging labels. But, they are animal cookies. Always have been. They are soft, buttery, crumbly, shortbread cookies. Not crackers.

According to Merriam-Webster, a “cracker,” is

“a dry thin crispy baked bread product that may be leavened or unleavened.”

Merriam-Webster then goes on to define a “cookie” as

“a small flat or slightly raised cake.”

Can there truly be much debate? Could an animal cracker be mistaken for a cake? (Maybe so, for its frosted cousins, such as the Keebler Frosted Animal Crackers, but not for the standard animal cracker.)

What, then, is the standard for the animal cracker? Stauffer’s originated the animal cracker in the US back in 1871. And, true to their legacy, they still make a mean animal cracker. Stauffer’s Animal Crackers have a similar outline and package as their cookied, Nabisco brethren, but follow through on their cracker promise.

Semi-sweet, crisp, and airy, Stauffer’s always delivers. Further, they offer good value. For a period of time, Costco offered a giant, 5 lb. Stauffer’s Bear Jug. I’ve seen smaller bear jugs and bags at Target and Walgreens occasionally, but unfortunately the consistency of the cracker is not matched with consistency of shelf stocking. (I can rarely find Stauffer’s on my shopping escapades.)

As such, I often find myself picking up Trader Joe’s Organic Animal Crackers for $2.99 for a 1-pound tub. I can’t say I know what’s “organic” about an artificial animal cracker, but I can say Joe makes a mean cracker.

And that’s what I’m always looking for… a great animal cracker. The world has many cookies, and Nabisco is behind many of them. But, their “animal crackers” are not among these cookie greats, nor their cheap, low-rent, imitation knockoffs. (I’m looking at you, Keebler and Borden.) The thing is, I don’t need any more new cookie encounters. Mostly, I don’t need Nabisco and friends converting their remnant cookie cruft into “crackers;” if future generations only encounter these cookies-in-disguise, they’ll never know the joy of a delicious, dry, crispy, baked, semi-sweet, bread product in the shape of an animal.

Instead, they’ll only be digesting disappointment.

Most interesting to me, however, has been their quiet rollout of MicroID support last week. ClaimID quickly posted, Fred Stutzman followed suit, and the MicroID blog alerted folks as well.

MicroID, for the uninitiated, is a snippet of code (which is made up a user’s email address and the URL of the current web page) which can be used by machines to verify the owner of the current web page. As a user, I find it incredibly annoying to tell the multitude of sites I use what other sites I use. (“You’re a computer,” I say. “Figure it out.”) As more sites roll out MicroIDs behind the scenes, pages/profiles I author (or am somehow responsible for, such as my YouTube Favorites links or my Amazon Wish List) could quickly be “sniffed out” by sites I already use.

Why would I want them to know what other pages/sites I use? I answered some of this in my interview upon joining YDN. But, quickly, it boils down to a decentralized and lightweight trust system that would allow the software behind any site at which I’m recognized to provide relevant content/recommendations. That, and I wouldn’t need to spend any time sharing all my other account usernames with a site I’m not even sure I want to continue using.

Anyway, MyBlogLog is following in the rich history of other major providers adding MicroID support: Digg, Plaxo, Last.fm, Wink, and others.

(Side note: As some may know, I had the good pleasure of working closely with the MyBlogLog team for the first two quarters of 2007. Aside from getting to getting to work on a new version of the Recent Readers widget and the all-new Profile widget (among migrating to the Yahoo! ID and the common Yahoo! profile representation), I got to work alongside some of the incredibly talented crew: Todd, John, Steve, Chris, Robyn, Ian and Eric.)

Additionally, Max’s plugin makes it easy to toggle between the production release and the more cutting-edge builds.

You can see an example of this plugin in the bottom-left corner of this page… just hover over the grey tab, and a pop-out bar will provide controls for playback of a series of MP3s I’ve hidden in this page’s code (courtesy of hip-hop mixtape master Mick Boogie).