Aehso’s Output

Assuming the stats behind these graphs are accurate, the UK appears to have passed yet another tipping point in the relentless growth of social network websites.

• Social networks accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for webmail services:
  
• Social networks referred more traffic to other websites than webmail services:
  

Email is truly dying a slow and painful death. (Yep, I know these figures are not including non-webmail email but…)

(Attribution: all graphs and stats are from Hitwise)

A while back I posted about Vodafone Ireland offering 500Mb for EUR9.99 per month. Some interesting comments on that post prompted me to followup with Vodafone to clarify a few things. Unfortunately I can’t print their response (it was ‘private’). However, I can clarify a few facts:

• The package can only be used to access Vodafone Live! content (i.e. data to/from the live.vodafone.ie gateway.)
• The package does not apply to use of your mobile phone as a modem (i.e. data to/from the isp.vodafone.ie gateway.)

With this package Vodafone charge an effective rate of €0.02 per Mb to download data from their Live service gateway up to 50Mb per day. If you go over 50Mb per day they start charging €5.00 per Mb.

With their “Modest” or “Medium” data service packages (see Vodafone pay monthly charges) they charge between €0.48 per Mb(€12/25) or €0.30 per Mb (€15/50) to transmit data via their ISP gateway (NOT the Live! gateway).

If you have not signed up for their “Modest” or “Medium” package then the data rate charge is €12.80 for the first Mb and €5.12 per subsequent Mb. (2c/KB up to 512 kbs and 0.5c/kb for any usage over 512kbs).

So Vodafone data rates vary from a minimum of €0.02/Mb (Live! data rate) to a maximum of €12.80 per Mb (general data rate) - incredible! If they had phone call charges like these the regulator would be all over them.

So mobile data via Vodafone remains potentially exhorbently expensive and confusing. The confusion is compounded by Vodafone’s use of the label “Mobile Internet” for this service. With this package a user can get access to reformatted versions of certain WWW sites. Calling that Mobile Internet is like calling a bicycle a supercar. The Internet, as in that series of interconnected tubes through which the worlds computers communicate over protocols based on Internet Protocol(IP), is completely out of bounds.

This service should be called the “Vodafone Network”. However there is nobody to regulate this type of thing, is there?

Vodafone do offer a 3G/GPRS broadband modem as an alternative but a) I need a service that allows me to use my existing 3G handset as a modem (so that my N800 can connect via bluetooth) and b) I don’t want to pay €30 per month for a service I’ll only use in bursts when on the road. They also offer a business email push service but this doesn’t cater for my ssh and http protocol access requirements.

So, we remain in the dark ages.

Wonderful post (and followup) by Steve Vinoski, spawning lots of other discussions.  I should be surprised by some of the comments but… I’m not - I suspect agendas, pride and reputations may be at play.  Imho, and I stress humble opinion, his views are completely valid. Can enterprise architects disregard the architecture, constraints and protocols that helped the Web scale and adapt to be the global platform it is today?  If they want to build something that will adapt and scale then I also think the answer has to be No.

Platforms like ESBs were built to solve the problem of interconnecting and integrating enterprise systems. The disconnect between how an ESB-based or RESTful solution approach the same problem can mostly be explained by the fact that they both evolved from very different starting points, and therefore have very different principals at their core. 

ESBs, having evolved from DCE-RPC, CORBA based RPC architectures, have always required static definition of non-uniform remote interfaces.  The modern WS-Deathstar-type ESBs are still based on this concept, with WSDL interface typically backed by statically compiled implementations (or if you are exotic XML based mediation languages).  The remote interface semantics can be augmented by a variety (cluster f&@k?) of ‘enterprisey’ features like transactions, routing and reliability defined by a collection of related specifications but it turns out that implementations based on some of those specifications do not interoperate or scale.  This is primarily a function of questionable specification development processes and over complexity.

In the end the non-uniform interfaces at the heart of these solutions tightly couple the clients and servers and this coupling is the underlying limiting factor on the adaptability and extensibility of these systems.  I still really struggle to find a successful real world internet-available IDL or WSDL based web service that has been used in a series of completely unexpected contexts (i.e. mashups) or that has evolved beyond more than one or two revisions without completely breaking backward compatibility for old clients.

In parallel the RESTful HTTP standard emerged and provided the platform for the Web that has scaled and adapted to truly global proportions.  This wasn’t an accident - the Web succeeded because of the RESTful principals upon it was built - stateless, client server, layered systems that support caching and of course the true use of Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State (thankfully now referable to as ‘the hypertext constraint‘).  To me HATEOAS is the most critical feature of RESTful solutions. It is the one feature that negates the need for non uniform interfaces and it is here where the two approaches diverge dramatically.  It also isn’t an easy concept to grasp for folks who are used to traditional RPC oriented systems. 

Regardless, the recent emergence of dynamic languages like Python and Ruby, and their respective web application frameworks, Django and Rails, is now making it economically efficient for anyone to produce RESTful web services that can scale and that are reusable.  Steve is just expressing his opinion that this approach works better.

Don’t get me wrong - the ESB approach has been proven to succeed and
scale but primarily in limited deployment environments and usually only when considerable resources are thrown at the solution.  To put it another way, the inherent limits in non-uniform interface based systems can be pushed through use of sophisticated tools and language bindings but this only be achievable when considerable resources are thrown at the solution.  I think this is what Steve is getting at - I don’t think Steve is saying ESBs are “bad”, just that they are not the best platform for building internet scale services/resources

(Hey, check it out, I didn’t mention SOA once!)

BTW, I’m reading The Future Of Ideas at the moment, hope to write more about that soon, but it does relate to the notion of control mentioned in Steve’s latest followup post.

Ronan pointed me to an interesting Wired blog entry on Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph problem. The social graph problem requires many of solutions that Dion’s Dream River needs so I was going to just comment that it will take a long time for any of this to happen (thankfully Brads essay openly calls this out).

Then I read that Brad might be joining Google. So I’ve changed my comment to “it might happen just a little bit sooner”.  This is just the type of problem that the folks at Google love to try solve…

The Dal Lamp (flash image after the jump) is one of those devices that just makes me wonder where we are going with all this technology stuff:

Dal can receive messages sent by your friend via email or via your telephone. The messages are colored animations that can be created for each type of emotions you want to show. A personal language and grammar can be created between two persons: only them knows what the lamp is expressing.

Beautiful concept but I’m having real difficulty thinking of a real practical use (I know, I know, it doesn’t have to have one but it would help!)

Violet are also the company behind the Nabaztag (great flash intros after the jump). This one just has to be seen to be believed. Oddly enough, I can see the appeal if you travel and have young kids that you don’t get to see every evening. If you just like talking devices in your living/bedrooms then you might want one - not for me though.

Strange, strange, place, this wired world…

If you regularly need to cite sets of web pages (URLs) and annotate them with references (perhaps to ask questions or offer opinions) then you should check out Trailfire. It allows you to create a single URL that leads the reader to a subsequent set of pages, each annotated with balloon text with your comments.

No need for screenshots, here’s a trail I just created about Web Service API Keys that spans Amazon, Flickr, Google and Facebook API signup pages. Trailfire also host a trail view/summary page for each trail.

I created the above using their Firefox extension in just a minute - quite nifty! A small UI usability suggestion for the Trailfire folks though - don’t automatically add buttons to the main Firefox navigation bar by default! That is sacred screen real estate that people don’t want to have to clean it up after installing an extension. This also applies for the del.icio.us extension folks by the way! A dedicated Trailfire toolbar that I can hide the 99% of the time that I’m not building trails would be far more appropriate.

From Read/Write Web (comment # 2 was NOT from me):

The core future media concept is the Agav - an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV - man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer - or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…

Hot on the heels of Joost, Dublin based Babelgum have opened their public beta.  They are imposing a daily download limit at the moment though.  Content owners can go here to find out why they’d want to use Bablegum to distribute video content.

Initial impressions are good, the fullscreen UI employing floating transparent dialogs and widget panels that are all the rage these days.  Picture quality is excellent and they have some decent original material like Jesus Children Of America.

Let the content race begin…

Update: I forgot to also give a shout out to Democracy 0.9.6 - it is their last version before changing name to Miro.

EC Telecoms Market Commissioner Viviane Reding:

You cannot have a knowledge based economy if large parts of society don’t have broadband.

This quote, in the context of yet another EC report has re-confirmed just how poor broadband services and competition are in Ireland. It also largely calls into question our government’s assertion that they are really building a knowledge based economy.

Who is to blame? The toothless COMREG don’t seem to be capable of doing anything to drive competition (apparently the maximum fine they can impose on a telco is 3,000 euro - is that true?) and the EU report calls for further reform.

I think the is unfair to pick on the fixed line broadband services only though. Voice services in Ireland are also crap, they should have highlighted that too. And don’t get me started on mobile data services.

No doubt the government will just rename COMREG to something else, ignore the report completely or promise that it’ll be better next year, after the election.

Interesting to see Babelgum are setting up shop in Dublin. It is nice to see them cite the availability of skilled technical people as the key reason for locating here though I suspect that favourable corporation tax rates may also have been a key factor.

Coincidently, Read Write Web has a timely comparative review of Babelgum, Joost and Zattoo. (It also mention ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube but I guess Democracy doesn’t fit into the IPTV category?).