Making the Google Chrome Speed Tests
Today Google released a new beta build of their fastest version of Chrome to date for the Mac, Linux and Windows. From the Google Chrome Blog:
Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.
Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, weintroduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can nowsynchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while inincognito mode.
Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.
To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.
Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.
The video that was made to illustrate how fast Chrome has become is phenomenally cool:
The Geocities-izer
Make any webpage look like it was made by a 13-year-old in 1996. Amusing.
SXSW 2010, The Pitchforks Come Out Once Again (hey, it rhymes)
As my previous post noted, Evan Williams was the Keynote Interview on Monday at South By Southwest Interactive at 2:00 pm (SXSWi). I stopped writing that post shortly after the one good quote that Evan made about openness because the wheels began to fall off of the wagon of the interview at that point
In 2007, Sarah Lacy famously crashed and burned when she interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at SXSWi. Lacy was criticized for asking softball questions and generally getting too personal and seeming too comfortable with her interview subject. The Twitter backchannel, or conversation of audience members on Twitter while the interview was going on resembled a virtual pitchfork and torch mob who revolted in mid-interview. Things only got worse when Lacy turned over the interview to Q&A from the crowd when the crowd started to get audibly frustrated and hostile. It went down in history as the most notorious SXSWi Keynote Interview and many thought it's lessons would prevent anyone else from ever flopping an interview with a tech illuminati again.
That all ended today. One half-hour before the interview began, the room started to fill quickly. My wife and I arrived about 15 minutes before it began and had considerable trouble finding 2 seats next to one another near the back of the room on the left side. Several announcements were made for audience members to fill in seats and the interview started a bit late as more people tried to squeeze in. Many people were standing along the walls and near the back. And then it began
Umair Haque and Evan Williams walked onto the stage from the right. They quickly sat down and it took a minute or so for Umair to clear up a microphone issue he was having. At that point they briefly mentioned that Evan had an announcement to make about their new @anywhere feature they were rolling out soon. Evan breezed over this information rather quickly, showed a very short video demo, and they both moved past the news. I think many people were still contemplating this news, and wanting more info, when Umair started talking about anything and everything except what the audience wanted to hear from the interview. Within 20 minutes people started standing a leaving. I began to notice snarky tweets coming across my stream from people I follow noting that Umair kept talking about his own personal stories with twitter and his own blog posts. He would sometimes take 2 or 3 minutes to ask a question and then jump in quickly after only letting Evan talk for a short bit. His questions were uninteresting and boring. Consequently, whenever he allowed Evan to answer a question at length, his only response would be "Interesting." or "Fascinating". People started to make jokes on Twitter adding fascinating after their tweets mocking him.
Oh and during all of this? People were leaving. Now just a few people, but a LOT. 1/2 hour into the interview there was almost a line to get OUT of the Keynote because the volunteers weren't letting people leave through the rear doors, but instead, out of a set of large double doors on the side of the hall. This was because the hallway outside the keynote had already gotten so crowded from people leaving that people had no where to go once they got outside. My wife and I stuck it out until about 15 minutes before it was over. By the time we left at 3:00 (the interview ran until about 3:15 I think) there was a sea of empty chairs with a person or two every 2 or 3 empty chairs. I guess that about 60% (or more) had left at that point. You can check out some of these articles on other sites to see what people were saying on twitter. Look for yours truly in the Huffington Post one.
Twitter launching new @anywhere platform for websites
Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced during his Keynote Interview today at South By Southwest Interactive, that Twitter is rolling out their new @anywhere platform.
It integrates Twitter accounts into your website. When users click a link, they can follow your writer, see her latest tweet, etc on your site. This information is provided by small modal overlay popups. This is an obvious value-add for content/media websites. Twitter is launching with 10,000 sites including NY Times, Huffington Post
From the Twitter blog:
When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.
We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere. Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!
When we're ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.
Later in the interview, Evan was asked what he thought about his company, with regards for openness. Evan responded by saying that they had a lot of discussions at Twitter of whether to use the word 'open' or 'transparency'. His conclusion was that, "A window is transparent but a door is open." He said that they always try to proceed down the road of openness. We have of course seen this with how 3rd party developers are able to use the versatile Twitter API to use twitter in many ways, from 3rd party apps to social media mashups with other services, such as Foursquare or Gowalla.
Future Shock
"Future Shock" by Fraser Speirs. This article is simply amazing. Read it.
Some choice quotes:
For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".
It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.
In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.
AT&T has only reduced spending on its network since the 2007 iPhone launch
AT&T has received a great deal of criticism for the abysmal quality of its network in major cities. They've always countered that they were going to, at some point in the future, upgrade the quality of service in those areas where it is poor. But according to their own SEC filings, they've actually been pulling back on spending on their network.
All this time they've been taking more and more iPhone owners on unlimited plans, they've actually cut their spending on the network that is supposed to carry their data. Is it any wonder that people are so mad?
Images courtesy of Gizmodo:
