James Wilson /blog

So some ex-Google-tards decide to leave Google and make their own search engine. Right, since so many great things have come from ex-google-tards. The best is, what, FriendFeed? With the exception of all these “Web 2.0″ zealots, it’s pretty much just pure rubbish.

But anyways, they made Cuil. Or is it Cuill. Though you pronounce it “cool.” Yeah, that name choice will certainly work out for them.

Zealot: Hey, you should try Cuil. It’s so awesome. OMG. It’s a “cuil” way to search. Hehehehe.
Random Guy: Umm, ok.
Later, Random Guy proceeds to try cool.com. Fails. Then Googles cool. Gets Wikipedia articles and a Gwen Stephanie video. Says screw it, and goes about doing something more productive. Like watching pr0n.

With their $33 million, you would’ve thought they might have been able to secure cool.com or at least think of a less retarded name, but I guess you can never underestimate the genius of 2.0. Obscure names are just as cool as they are useful!

But name-fail behind them, their product is this totally, completely awesome, and web, no wait, world changing technology. Not.

Let’s just try a generic search of ‘paintball’:

Google:

Cuiooooll:

Notice how Google’s is really relevant, while Quillllll just isn’t? Let’s go through the problems, shall we:

1. Explore By Category. Paintball Markers? Good. Pneumatic Weapons? Not Bad. Commodore 64 Games? Umm, not really. Marvel Comics Supervillains? No. Towns In New York? Yeah, Huntington would be Huntington Beach, which is on the other side of the country. 1990’s American Television Series? Ok, now you just lost me.
2. Result box positioning. “Hey, let’s just put the result right under each other, ignoring length.” “Great idea. Computing something to make the results seem orderly would be hard.”
3. Results. A parked domain, tripod site (they seem to still exist), a canadian store, 3 spam sites, 1 wikipedia article (hey, that’s useful), and a couple of actually relevant sites. Yeah, that’s really sad.
4. Crappy bottom toolbar thing or whatever the hell you would call it that takes up 33 pixels of the page to display a 2/3 columns switcher, which both are horrendous, and the pagination part, since going to page 2 is so useful after not having seen page 1. They have so much confidence in their first page that they know you won’t find whatever you’re looking for on there.
5. Black or white. Pick one.

And they’re just trying too hard to be Google, but want to look like they aren’t. Really simple home page, but it’s different because it’s black and blue instead of green and white. And instead of being centered, it’s kinda off centered, because that’s the king of usefulness. Results are still blue link, black description, and green url link. But the results are in columns, which is so much different. Usability be damned.

They also decided to add random pictures to random results.

Where the hell did they get that picture from? I’ve never seen it before. And what are they? Drawers? What does that have to do with xrho.com or sites. Pretty sure this will cause some problems with people not wanting to be associated with whatever picture is next to it. I personally don’t want this site to be associated with some sort drawers, unless they’re really awesome ones, which these clearly aren’t.

Then there’s this:

Don’t know what the hell happened there. The second page just says it can’t find any results. Great coding there guys.

Also, what’s with this TRACKID cookie you’re pushing to my computer. I thought you only saved my preferences which was sent with each request and you didn’t store any user information. What the fuck? Something called TRACKID definitely doesn’t fall into this.

Editing the ‘cols’ cookie is fun though.

Uggh. Whatever. I’m sure there’s so much more fail that I probably missed. Anyways, you guys should’ve stayed “stealth” (as dumbass Arrington calls it) forever.

Note: I don’t read TechCrunch, just saw the shitty headline in TechMeme.

Share This

Share This

Brightcove. Why the fuck do they even exist?

First, the embedding is horrible. It takes a while for the video player to load. Even if you had just had that page open before, it’s still going to take about 10 seconds to come up. How long does YouTube take? Next to none. I don’t ever have to see some ugly loading cube-like thing everytime I want to see something. Or see it the whole time in Konqueror, and I’ll assume Safari, since the video player never even loads. Good show.

And if I want to link to it or embed it somewhere else, the code comes up inside of the flash player. I guess the fact that working with text in flash is just about as annoying as having bees sting your eyes. Copy code. Wait, it didn’t copy. Copy code. I think it worked, no wait, it didn’t. Copy. Ok it worked, wait, fuck, it’s code for the other movie. WTF?

Also, instead of calling RSS RSS. They call it “Takeout.” It even has an RSS logo on a Chinese takeout box. Yup, it’s just as much fun as ordering Chinese takeout. And it makes you feel just as bad after using it. They think it’s a good plan to put the amount of uploaded videos in the title of the feed. Why? Who the fuck knows. Maybe they want to allow people to know the count of videos from the feed, but were too stupid to put another XML attribute. Here’s what the feed says in Google Reader:

“Brightcove - The Pbstar Channel - 17 Uploaded Videos” has no unread items.

Yup, I guess the 17 uploaded videos will never change, and I’ll never have any more videos to see.

And what’s even worse is that they only show you a thumbnail of the video. WTF? Don’t think your really shitty business model, see none, won’t last without people always viewing your site? Screw you guys, I’m going home, errr, back to YouTube, and they don’t even have RSS. I’ll gladly wait until someone uploads your video over there in order to bypass your crap.

But I guess since it’s beta, it can be complete crap. And businesses actually use them? I guess they don’t care as long as they get a cut of the ad revenue!!! OMG, Moneys!!! I like money. And what better way to be somewhere in the third to fifth in line to get your cut. That completely makes up for the horribleness that it is.

Share This

Coming from the WWDC, Apple announced it’s going to allow third party Web 2.0 applications. Really? Are you saying that previous to this that Safari wasn’t going to support even Javascript? Why thank you Mr. Jobs that you are now going to allow the basics of most browsers for years.

And how are Web 2.0 applications supposed to be iPhone applications. Last time I checked, you can’t use any of that multi-touch shit that’s so ‘revolutionary’ with javascript and HTML. Or that Web 2.0 apps haven’t existed for phone previous to this. What about twitter? That’s Web 2.0 and I can totally use that on my phone.

And what about games? I haven’t seen anything about games on the iPhone. I sure as hell can’t make a good game solely with javascript and html. I could try, but I don’t think it would any where near as good as a native java version. But really, why aren’t there any games? I guess you’ll be too busy using Google Maps to be busy playing games.

This like if Nintendo said, hey, if people want to make games for the Wii, do it from the Opera web browser. We don’t need that whole disk and game thing anymore. Everything is done with AJAX now. But instead, Nintendo has a $2000 SDK so more people could make games.

But hey, I should be glad, since now I can make applications that ’seamlessly access the iPhone services’. Great, I can now visit a site and not only worry about it trying to give me malware, I now have to worry about it making calls to Russia on my behalf.

But, I’m sure they secured it so that won’t be possible. Let’s just ignore that 1 day after Safari for Windows was released, multiple vulnerabilites were found. I’m sure iPhone’s Safari will be so much secure. Probably only 2 vulnerabilities will be found the first day, and that’s only because only a few can afford or get the damn thing.

Here’s about how far I see this going. Google Reader for the iPhone. They already have a Wii version, so an iPhone one is right up their alley. Probably some company will get millions in financing to build a solely iPhone web app, only to realize that only 5% will know about it, and of that 5, only 0.1% might use it. And when that 0.1% is out of half a million, you’re looking at 500 users. And if it isn’t free, which probably is the only way to make money from it, drop that user count to 50.

Sorry Jobs. I don’t buy the hype. Have fun selling all those slightly fancy iPods for ridiculous amounts of money.

Share This

Google released their new Google Gears app, which allows you to use some of their apps offline.

Neat right? Too bad it currently only works with Google Reader. And too bad it working with Google Reader kinda sucks.

In order to get it to work, you have to install Google Gears, that’s a given. Once it’s installed, you go to Google Reader, and it asks you if you want to allow this to access Google Gears, which it proceeds to not remember, so everytime you go to Google Reader, you’re presented with the same damn dialog. After that, you have to click the green arrow at the top, which sometimes doesn’t show up for reasons unbeknownst to me. It’ll then download the last 2000 entries sending a crap load of XMLHttp requests, which would sometimes cause Firefox to hang a bit. Once it finishes all that, you then can go offline.

Great. If I ever want to use it offline, I just have to make sure I know I’m going offline, and prepare for it accordingly. A spontaneous outage? You ain’t reading shit. Happen to close Firefox? You’re also screwed. Anything that didn’t allow you to meticulously follow each step, you’re offline reader is useless.

And even if you were able to follow all the steps, it’s still not that useful. Any sort of media won’t load.

Useless

Online

Maybe I shouldn’t expect or want them to download the media, but since most posts consist of some sort of media, the whole offline experience is degraded.

What if the site doesn’t provide a full content feed? It’s basically pointless. And what about link sites like digg or reddit? Those are useless offline.

But what’s most suprising about this is that Google Reader still doesn’t have a search feature. Seriously, you’re a search engine company, yet you guys don’t have one. With the exception of Analytics, which I’m not sure how a search would be implemented, Reader is the only one without a search feature. Maybe how you wrote, it would be hard to implement it, but you’re fucking Google. Fix it.

Share This

Sputtr, come on. You’re just about as bad as SimpleWeather.

Sputtr is a site that allows you to search multiple search engines from one page. Woo hoo! It also looks to be done in PHP, for some reason. Why PHP? Who know, since a static HTML file is more than enough.

Want proof? Here’s a nice sputtr clone I whipped up:

SearchFastr

1 static HTML file. Small amount of Javascript. No PHP or other dynamic scripting language. No copy and pasting code from some site.

Want the source, just go to View Source. That’s it.

Search quicker, better, cleaner. SearchFastr

Share This

You invented IRC!

So Meebo’s new Meebo Rooms feature launched last night, and it’s a totally spectacular, original idea. It’s like a chat room, but instead of just having a boring chat room, you can watch a video next to it. No more of that link and having to click-through shit for us. I mean, that shit was so complicated. And don’t worry that the video will be really small, since everybody wants their videos to become smaller and smaller.

They also give you the spectacular feature of being able to style your room. Totally revolutionary. It’s totally not like someone setting up their own ajax chat room and styling the page themselves. I guess that’s just too complicated.

And wait, it’s still better. You can still use all the IM features too, in separate windows that are still part of the same window, since having separate windows is just too hard nowadays. Everyone wants their windows inside of different windows inside of different windows. It’ll be a recursive paradise!

And what’s the icing on the cake? It’s all done in AJAX. None of that flash crap for us. We like the soft, cuddly, memory leaking, high cpu usage features that only ridiculous AJAX can bring. Why use something like persistent connections, when we can just make a new HTTP request every time. That’s using your noggin!

Share This

Neat. Looks like last.fm just added flash widgets, or at least, I think they just did. I might have been slow in finding them.

Anyways, instead of having just an image based on your chart, it’s now a fancy flash “widget”. I guess images aren’t Web 2.0 enough. Which means, instead of about 120 bytes of code, you can now use 3.1 kilobytes to show even less info.

Compare:

122 B:

3.1 KB:

Yeah, you can see album covers, and the width is smaller, but it only shows 5 songs, while the previous show 10, or customizable down to 5. You can also use the first one in forums or most anywhere, but the latter, only sites that allow you to use html. Also, instead of having all customizable backgrounds and such, you only have a choice of four colors, black, red, grey, and light blue.

Another annoyance, it will stick to the top of whatever text you have below it no matter what. Add as many <br /> as you want, it’ll still sit right above the text.

Now, to be fair, I’ve added the recently played chart to my sidebar, and they do still have the image script available, and I hope they keep it around, but I’m not so sure that they will.

Anyways, here are the new embeds

Continue reading…

Share This

Been meaning to write about this, but have just been really busy. Apollo is a Rich Internet Application (RIA), that allows you to build desktop apps using HTML, JavaScript, Flex, and other web technologies. There are a few samples of applications that can be made on the sample page. Really, it looks pretty neat, but I’m a little hesitant of the possibility of an XSS being able to compromise my computer, like Adobe has already had a problem with, but that hopefully will be an unfounded fear, at least for a little while.

Download it now

Share This

We all knew this was coming, especially since Viacom was getting all uppity about it pulling 100k of their videos, starting their own video site, and then making a deal with Joost. So now, they’ve sued them for a cool $1 Billion. Nothing like a lawsuit being a nice round number instead of being an actual representation of damages done.

Let’s look at their US District Court filing.

Page 1, Point 3

including such popular (and obviously copyrighted) television programming and motion pictures as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Ren & Stimpy,” “MTV Unplugged,” “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Mean Girls,” and many others.

Wait, Ren & Stimpy? Since when was that a popular show, and hasn’t even been on the air for over 10 years, so how is this hurting them? O, that’s right, dvd boxsets. They definitely have enough. If I want the whole series, it will only cost me a cool $100.97, and another $19.99 if I want the lost episodes, so now it’s a cool $120.96. So I’m supposed to pay $120.96 if I want to watch a show that aired 10 years, that was only mediocre at the time? Nah, I think I’ll just watch them on dailymotion instead. I’m sure collectors or big fans of that show will buy them, but the average person who remembers seeing it a long time ago and wanting to see it again definitely won’t, and the collectors will buy them even if they can get the videos for free. Money lost: $0.

And Mean Girls? Sure, Lohan was really hot in that movie in both the attractiveness scale and her ability at math, but a popular movie that is costing Viacom millions of dollars? No way.

Page 3, Point 6

Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos and send notices to YouTube demanding that it “take down” the infringing works.

No, that’s because of your fancy DMCA act (Yes, I know that is literally say Digital Millennium Copyright Act act, but it sounds better) I’m sure you support. By the looks of that, it looks like YouTube is following it perfectly.

Page 4, Point 8

YouTube allows its users to make the hidden videos available to others through other YouTube features like the “embed,” “share,” and “friends” functions.

I’m sure they’re making millions by embedding a video into a page, since they are showing no advertising and just using bandwidth when a video is embedded.

Page 11, Point 32

To do this, the user simply copies the “embed” code, which YouTube supplies for each video in its library, and then pastes that code into the other website, where the embedded video will appear as a television-shaped picture with the YouTube logo prominently displayed and a triangular icon that any user can click to play the video. [emphasis mine]

Television shaped picture? O, you mean rectangular, since only TVs are 4×3 rectangles. And what about this whole HDTV thing you media people are so pushing? Aren’t they supposed to have already replaced these old 4×3 TVs by now? Those embedded YouTube videos sure don’t look like those TVs. And shouldn’t you be confident enough that people want to see everything if full HD glory, and not watch it on some small, low quality stream. O wait, that’s right, no one really wants HD.

Page 12, Point 34

But the videos that YouTube publicly performs and displays through the embed function to draw users back to YouTube’s own site are frequently the most popular copyrighted works created and owned by Plaintiffs, not YouTube.

Because YouTube doesn’t own any of the videos it fucking hosts.
Straight from YouTube’s Terms of Service:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions

Page 13, Point 37

Defendants profit handsomely from the infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and receive financial benefits directly attributable to the infringing activity.

Profit handsomely my ass. August of last year, YouTube had yet to turn a profit. Maybe after Google bought them, things could’ve gone up, but it’s no where near profiting handsomely.

Page 16, Point 43

YouTube offers a feature that allows users to designate “friends” who are the only persons allowed to see videos they upload, preventing copyright owners from finding infringing videos with this limitation. YouTube has also recently limited the search function so that it identifies no more than 1,000 video clips for any given search. Thus, for example, if there are several thousand infringing clips from the “South Park” series on YouTube, the limitations YouTube has placed on the search function may prevent Plaintiffs from identifying all of the infringing clips.

First, if only a few friends can view the video, how is that really hurtful? It’s like loaning someone a DVD, though I’m sure you think that’s copyright infringement too. And have you ever heard of Google, you know, the owners of the site you’re suing. You could try that for a change. Results 1 - 10 of about 269,000 from youtube.com for south park. Yes, it’s so hard to find those infringing videos.

Hey Viacom, suck it

Share This