Solar OP Technology Blog

Today’s hottest technology news, according to tFeeder:

• Techrunch Robin Wauters (the leading Techrunch blogger in terms of tweets-per-post), reports that Youtube no longer supports Internet explorer 6. IE6 is a terrible product, but where does it stop? Could Google one day say ‘we do not support IE6,and IE7, and IE8′ ? The post is Boiling, with over 1,000 retweets in the past couple of hours.
• Techrunch also reports that sales of the Palm Pre are flat. Techrunch has a long history with the Plam Pre, as they criticized the product early on and caused quite a stir when a fellow tech blogger reviewed a giveaway Palm Pre, hinting foul play
• Cnet news has an interesting story about the growing importance of Chip makers (e.g. Intel) as the Google-Microsoft war expands. It used to be a software war, between search engines, office suites and online services, but since Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS, it’s becoming a hardware war as well.
• Engadget, the gadgets blog, reports that Apple crossed the 1.5 Billion downloaded apps mark. That’s truly amazing. Apple invented the market for application downloads and no one to date was able to imitate its success.

Read more…

The latest, hottest technology news from tFeeder:

• It’s interesting to see that 2 of the top 5 top technology stories on tFeeder are Techcrunch stories,and one story is a Wired story - usually the top 5 are owned by Mashable (see screenshot below).
• Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that a company called DST is buying stocks from Facebook employees. That means a lot of happy faces on the Facebook campus, congratulations! Mashable also covers this story and it’s a BOILING story on tFeeder.
• Techcrunch also has a story written by an anonymous person, an executive from one of the largest Internet companies (at least this is what they say, who knows, a PR stunt??), suggesting the whole Google ranking and SEO industry should be regulated. That would mean many SEO companies will die, I don’t see it happening.
• A big story is coming from Mashable’s Adam Ostrow - apparently Microsoft will offer its office 2010 suite (Word,Excel etc.) as a hosted service, similar to Google Apps. Is this Microsoft’s counterpunch to Google’s Chrome OS announcement?
• ReadWriteWeb suggests that comments are dead and tweets are their replacement. These days, everyone thinks that Twitter will kill everything - it will kill Google search, it will kill RSS, now it will kill comments. Whatever..

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A few years ago, when technology blogs started becoming popular, I used to waste a lot of time visiting each blog, trying to find interesting technology stories. Then RSS became popular, and as most tech blogs started offering RSS subscription, much of the time spent on visiting each blog was reduced to a short, periodic visit to my RSS reader, looking for interesting technology stories.

But as time went by, I realized that RSS was not enough. Although it offers a simple way of accessing a large amount of content, it lacks one major feature - ranking. The RSS protocol was never meant to include any information in regards to the quality of each story. There were many other options to find hot stories (such as Digg), but in the past few months, there’s a new kid on the block - Twitter. And as most technology bloggers would agree - Twitter is becoming a powerful a recommendation engine, particularly useful for promoting interesting technology stories.

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About 7 years ago I decided to build a search engine for video clips (yes, including adult clips). Youtube was still an egg, and low-quality video clips started popping like mushrooms after rain. I spent about 3 weeks on the project, until I realized that’s a lot harder than I though. The amount of data you need t crawl and index is huge, you never know where an innocent link will lead you.

Fast forward to 2009. I decided I’d build a search engine, inspired by the launch of Bing. I though I’d take it straight at good old B. gates (is he still with the company??). I  didn’t have much time to spend on the project, and I’m broke. So I decided I’ll build a search engine in 1 hour, spending no more than 10$.

The 1 hour, 10$ Search Engine: PinGoog

Here’ how:

1. Google Custom Search - why crawl, index and search when you can outsource all these activities? So I outsourced it to Google. They offer Google Custom Search - a Google search box anyone can embed inside any webpage, directing the search query to Google own search engine. Results are displayed on a Google’s page, or on your own page. Revenue generated from click on ads in the results page is shared.

2. Google App Engine - you need a webpage (a simple html page would do the trick) to accommodate the Google search box. There are many places yo can host the page (free or paid hosting etc.). I decided I’d use Google App Engine. First, It’s free. Second, I have experience using it (solarplanez.com, for example). And third, and most important , it’s infinitely scalable. So if I get a sudden spike of traffic when a top tech blogger links to PinGoog Google App Engine handles it easiliy - I don’t have to worry about the service crashing due to lack of resources or a poor hosting plan.

3. Register domain name - That’s where the 10US$ went (actually,the project went over-budget: 10.19$ for the domain name). I mistakenly used GoDaddy to register the domain name. What I should have done was use Google Apps own domain name registration services - it would make things more simple (read below why).

4. Register with Google Apps - since my application runs on Goolge App Engine, by default, its URL is something like: http://pingoog.appspot.com. I wanted to change that to a my own domain name,  pingoog.com. To do that, I had to sign up for Google Apps. Only through Google Apps was I able to change my application’s URL to http://www.pingoog.com. When you register with Google Apps, you can buy the domain name through them- it’s a good idea because you don’t have to configure DNS on GoDaddy (or any other domain register service you used).

Steps 1-4 took me about an hour of work. It cost me 10.19US$ for the domain name registration - everything else was free! Since then, I continued working on PinGoog, trying to spice things up.

5. Miscellaneous APIs - Once the search engine was up and running, I decide to add some real time data, collected from various web sources, to make the search experience a bit more fun, interesting and unexpected. I connected to API services from Digg, Yelp and Google News. From Digg - I pull the top rated stories in different topics and from Yelp, I provide localized review services, currently for the US only. So if you visit PinGoog from New York, it will show you reviews of bars, restaurants, movie theaters and other interesting information, all from New York, all randomly.

No two visits to PinGoog are the same.

And yes, if you keep visiting PinGoog to do your Google searches, you’ll get to play the games.

Just noticed that when you do a search in Google, the logo in the search results page is a Tetris game - a Google logo made of Tetris! I wonder what was the score on that game…

Here’s the screenshot:

Update: It appears the Google Tetris logo appeared all over the globe, in some countries replacing the official logo in Google’s homepage. It marks the 25th anniversary of the invention of the Tetris game.

You might have also noticed that the screenshot was taken form an Ubuntu Linux machine running Google’s chrome browser. I’ll review Google Chrome on Linux in a couple of days. Register to our RSS feed to read this and other technology news.

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine. We all know that, part due to the fact that Microsoft will spend about 100MUS$ in advertisement. But someone didn’t quite agree with the definition of Bing as a search engine - arch-rival Google, the undisputed king of search. It’s gonna be a war, and I found earlier today that Bing drives higher quality traffic to my blog.

Google Analytics is a service Google provides to webmasters and bloggers who are interested in knowing how many people visit their blog and most importantly, where they come from.

But when Goolge Analytics display statistics for ‘Traffic Sources’ ‘, it divides them into categories - direct traffic, referring sites , search engines etc. I found it very surprising to see that traffic I get from Bing is listed under the ‘Referring Sites‘ category, and not the ‘Search Engine‘ category.

Here’s the screenshot:

I don’t believe this is a mistake, as someone had to classify Bing to a Traffic Source type. This being such a delicate issue, I’m sure it’s been discussed thoroughly inside Google.

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There’s  been a lot of bang around Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine over the last few days. According to StatCounter, Bing already bypassed Yahoo in search volumes. Personally, I don’t trust any Microsoft service since they deleted my entire Hotmail mailbox, which included some very important emails. I’ll never trust them again.

Looking through one of my blogs (Open Source ERP) Google analytics figures, I noticed something very surprising - although obviously,  most of the traffic to that blog comes from Google searches, Bing drives much higher quality traffic. Higher quality traffic means visitors who view more pages, stay longer on my blog (twice as long as Google-driven users!!), and most significantly, do not leave my blog without reading any post (’Bounce Rate’, the lower-the better). In fact, bounce rate of Google visitors is more than twice that of Bing users.

Here are my Google Analytics referrers stats(click to enlarge):

My  open source ERP blog doesn’t get much traffic (about 500 daily  visitors), so there might be a skew in my stats. It would be interesting to hear from other tech bloggers if they experience the same behaviour.

We’ve had enough. Sure, Twitter is cool. Everyone’s using it. But the more you use it, the more you realize something’s wrong. You can’t point it out. Well, let us point it out for you - 140 characters are not enough. It’s too limiting.
So we hereby declare Project Tweeti 500. The goal? convince Twitter to cancel the 140 characters limit it currently imposes upon its users, and allow messages as long as 500 characters.

To show support for our goal, all you have to do is add a comment bellow, that says Tweeti 500 (all other comments for this post will be deleted). Please leave a valid email address and name. We will maintain a count of the comments in our homepage, hoping we can make a difference.

The official Youtube Clip - The Tyranny Of The 140

Aside from commenting this post, please use the SHARE button below to spread the word amongst your friends. Every comment counts!

To stay up to date on Tweeti 500 progress, register to our RSS feed.

Last year the people at Google announced project 10^100 - an ambitious plan to crowd-source world changing idea generation . The model they chose was to put 10M US$ into selected ideas, which will be developed by organizations Google thinks can turn these ideas into products (I have a better model supporting a similar cause - jumpstart the technology revolution). Since there are so many people in the world who think they are smart (including myself), Google was overwhelmed by submissions.
Read more…

It seems like these days everyone tweets (except for me, I hate Twitter). I won’t be surprised if people start having 140 characters conversations  (I’m sure mobile companies would hate that idea). And to be honest, to this day, I can’t understand why would anyone want to express themselves in such a limiting medium.

Twitter has been around for a couple of years. When it first came out, it was a geek thing. Many asked themselves what was the point of twitting. You want to share something with others? Write a blog, send an email, call a friend. Never the less, Twitter caught on like a Californian wildfire.

Much of the blame on Twitter’ss success can be attributed to tech blogs. They pushed it early, when no one else was really interested. They thought it was cool and used it to complement their blog’s content. Whenever a blogger felt lazy, they’d just twitt something meaningless and make their news-addicted, Ritalin-induced readers momentarily happy.

But then something unexpected happened - Twitter started becoming more popular than the blogs that created all the buzz around it. Readers attention span became shorter and shorter. The crowd wanted quick, short updates. And before you know it, blogs became arcane - too much information, too infrequent updates, too late. Bloggers had to adjust. How? by writing shorter posts, more frequently. On a long enough timeline, they’ll turn to yet another Twitter account.

When that happens, many blogs will disappear. Readers will become less interested in long, insightful articles. They’d want the punchline, without the setup, and the sooner they get it, the better. Bloggers will shift from producing quality content to looking for instant, exclusive content. And they will lose, because a single blog, as powerful as it may be, cannot compete against the gigabytes of information generated by the crowds at any given moment. Today,a tech blogger has his ’sources’ within a company that leaks exclusive inside information. Tomorrow, that source will just twitt the news, anonymously. Twitter shortens the time information flows from the point of creation to the point of perception by cutting the middleman (bloggers, reporters).

You could argue that what bloggers do is reduce the entropy of systems like Twitter - with so much information flowing out of Twitter, it’s almost impossible to filter out the noise. Google reduced the entropy of the world wide web, using a unique, very simple idea - use weighted backlinks to determine the quality of a data source (e.g. Pagerank of a web page). The next Google type service will be able to identify the most reliable, accurate and timely sources of information on Twitter, and present it to users. I’m sure there are already services trying to achieve this, but when one of these services will create the wow factor (the same one that Google created when it first launched), news, sports and technology blogs will become totally irrelevant.

In one of our next posts, we will try to describe how such a service, our BlogBuster, should look like. Register to our RSS feed to read more about our Twitter BlogBuster and other technology news.