Kodingen

As a coder, I've never found cloud-based IDEs to be very useful. Sure, its a great idea, all of your data and project work accessible from any location and securely stored. It sounds like the perfect development environment. I had played around with Cloud9IDE, but I never felt that they were getting it quite right, they had moved in a good direction, but their scope was too limited. I didn't just want to store my open source projects in the cloud, I wanted shell and FTP access, I wanted a small hosting platform for testing, I wanted the ability to share and publish my creations at will. No cloud IDE could give me that... until now.

Enter: Kodingen. Kodingen is a web developer IDE, plus FTP server, plus SVN/Git/CVS host, plus web host, plus platform. Its hard to describe all the things Kodingen does, or... will do, rather. Lets get that point out of the way first. The first thing you should keep in mind when building things on Kodingen is that it is a beta platform. Work has been progressing fairly rapidly as they gear up for their big stable release, but in using this as a development platform, you'll run into things that just aren't built yet. For instance, the integrated domain purchasing/linking: I have no idea how this will work in the future, it looks like a good idea, but the final product has yet to be released. As far as version control systems go, don't count on it just yet, those are still in development. For every feature that Kodingen has, there's another feature that just isn't finished yet. I don't really see this as a downside, however, instead, I feel very excited for what the future holds.

For a very-much-in-beta project, Kodingen is one of the slickest HTML5 applications I've laid eyes on. Everything slides in panels, smooth animations permeate every little thing, right click menus are abound and easy to use, and the interface is extremely clean for how powerful it is. They rely on a bunch of open source tools and technologies, which is a huge benefit for them (no licensing) and for their users (we can move away if we want). The major gripe I have is that we haven't heard from the developers in quite a while, the last public post was from March 16th. When you get into the backstory of the project, though, you can't really fault the guys. Kodingen was built from savings, without investors, without VC funding, without Techcrunch Distrupt or the LAUNCH conference. This incredibly useful, incredibly cool project was built by a very small team of developers with their own money. Very cool.

One thing that I wish worked now was the ability to pay for an account, out of all the features to lock out in the beta, I was initially surprised this was one of them. When thinking about it, you wouldn't want people paying for a half-baked, unfinished product, though. These guys are smart, they aren't greedy, and they know how to make their users happy. Progress is slow, but the site is fast and stable, and I'm sure when they finally release 1.0, its going to make a lot of people happy (and hopefully make them a lot of money as well). In the mean time, why don't you sign up for the free account over at https://kodingen.com and consider throwing these guys some dough if you like what you see.

Facebook's Added Transparency

Today Facebook has announced two major changes that directly combat issues that power users of the site have  had since the website's inception:

1. The ability to export your data. 
2. The ability organize friends into groups.

The most important of these is the ability to export user data. Every comment, picture, post, and status update, rolled into a ZIP file, given directly to the user. This is a game-changer. Facebook can no longer be called a walled garden. With the ability to take your data elsewhere, users don't have to feel "stuck" on Facebook. Want to leave and take your data elsewhere? Go to a social network that will allow you to upload your Facebook ZIP file. Just like that, you've left Facebook for (hopefully) greener pastures. Personally, I'll feel safer using Facebook, now that I know my data isn't forever locked away in the vaults. Facebook was one of the largest bastions of data lock-in, and now that they've changed, they've set an example that will (and should) be followed throughout the tech community.

While not as important as being able to leave, Facebook has also introduced a new Groups feature. Groups isn't just a resurrected "Friend Lists", groups will fundamentally change the way Facebook will operate. What if you want to post a message to your college drinking gang, but leave your family out of it? Before, it was convoluted. Creating the list, managing it, sending a message to the list. Friend lists never really felt like an A-List feature of Facebook. If groups work like they should, this will bring Facebook much closer to allowing users to separate their social networking actions to specific aspects of their lives. Want to create a Thanksgiving Dinner event for just your Family Group without your creepy Facebook-stalker seeing? Go right ahead. Like the title of the GigaOM article: New Facebook Groups Encourage Private Interactions. And it's true.

But what does this mean for startup projects like Diaspora? Hopefully not too much. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is Diaspora is still an open project (albeit a very young one) and still has a chance of doing these things better than Facebook. Diaspora was created with the ideas of data-export and social-aspects from the very beginning, Facebook was not. What may very well happen, though, is drive much-needed developers away from the project, simply because they don't see the need for it anymore. Only time will tell on this last point.

In the tech world, today's events seem like part of a recent trend: Once super-closed companies are starting to tear down their walls. With Apple allowing a Google Voice and Facebook letting users take their ball and go home, it seems that walled gardens are finally starting to realize that open is not only better, but more profitable as well. At-ease users are happy users.

The Probable Demise of PastaNet

Attention PastaNet Users [and trusted friends in science]: PastaNet may be going away soon. AT&T doesn't run their fiber across the street from where I used to live and has no idea when the Uverse service will be coming to my neck of the woods (about 500 feet away). I'm looking for any fast (and hopefully cheap, but I can pay a premium) ISP suggestions/comments/rants so I can pick one that may work for our users. From what it looks like, a best-case scenario (from my current knowledge) would be scaling back user accounts and active logins to a minimum level and having connection speeds hover around 30KBps. If any of you have ideas for ISPs that we could go with, or if you want to donate to Run-A-Fiber-Line-Directly-To-PastaNet Fund, please let me know. Your contributions to the think-tank of ideas and schemes, and your dollars, are greatly appreciated, and will help save PastaNet. As it stands now, running PastaNet off of the Time Warner infrastructure will cripple our operations and slow down everything we are trying to accomplish. I have recently been pricing how much a dedicated fiber run would cost and have put up a PayPal donate button on the right sidebar of this page. Thank you for helping me help you help us all, trusted friends in science.

Aardvark

I've stumbled upon a cool, new web service called Aardvark. Essentially, its ChaCha, but with a much higher limit on the amount of questions you can ask (7 at the moment), and on top of that, the limit resets daily. I've been using the service for a while now and have not been disappointed. Lets take a look at how the service works:
You submit a question to Aardvark via web, IM, or iPhone app (SMS and Android app in development!). Aardvark then sends the question to other users who want to answer questions on that topic. For instance, my topics include: Linux, Technology, Android, The Internet, and Operating Systems, among many others, so I receive questions on those topics (If you want, you can also take on any open question that has not received an answer yet). Aardvark then passes your question around to various individuals and has them give their best answers. Questions usually receive 2-3 answers, and times range around 5 minutes to a few hours for all answers to roll in. The time taken to get an answer back is relatively short, and the answers themselves tend to be more personalized and helpful than ChaCha's, which I have found to be unreliable at times. Question-askers are then asked to say "Thanks!" click one of three choices to rate the answer they received. "Was So-And-So's Answer Helpful?", you can choose: Yes, No, or Kind of but not for me. This helps Aardvark weed out the less-than-helpful users and give more questions to the higher-rated ones.
Aardvark is a pretty cool service, and with enough people and time, it could be as well known as Yahoo Answers or ChaCha, there are only a few things holding it back:

• The lack of an SMS option:
• The lack of an Android App
• Any major (revealing) news from the site regarding them being picked up by Google.

But the service has more going for it than against it, including: Social integration with Twitter and Facebook, a very well done (and innovative) community voting page, and a service that not only works, but provides great service to all of its users. Whenever I'm logged into my IM client, I absolutely love seeing Aardvark pop up with a tech question for me to answer. If I don't feel like it at the moment, I can tell it, "Busy" or "Pass" and it gets the idea. Aardvark doesn't bug me at all, its all very wonderfully tuned to be just the perfect amount of user interaction. Do yourself a favor and try it out today, I'm sure you'll quickly become a fan.


Aardvark

SEO: A Fake Science?

Disclaimer: 99% of this post was taken from a series of back-and-forth Facebook comments. The debate was extremely thought-provoking and raises some interesting questions from both sides of the fence. In the interest of the other individual, neither quotes, nor names will be posted regarding the discussion, rather, the general feel and main points of the conversation will be posted. There isn't a clear-cut victor at all, the point of this post is to get us thinking about the internet and how it is built, structured, searched, and consumed. To be honest, I thought about skipping this article entirely, as these are extremely controversial talking points among web-folk. Think about your own websites as you read on.

Recently I was involved in a Facebook debate about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and I align with Leo Laporte in his thinking about SEO. In case you don't know what this is, I'll explain it to you: Search Engine Optimization - These con-men promise you a number one spot on Google searches and the only thing they do is change page titles. There isn't any way to game Google, but these guys con people out of hundreds of dollars at a time with a snake-oil solution.

My position is that SEO is a fake science. Sure, there are a few things to make your site more search-friendly: Change your page titles to reflect your content, put important things near the top, register your domain for more than a year, and build a site map. Guess what? These are all things Google itself suggests when you look up page rank information or use Google's Webmaster Tools. There is no magical incantation to game Google. Not now, not ever. The only way to get top results is to create rich content on a consistent basis. How do you expect to game a constantly changing algorithm? The search algorithm goes through multiple changes every month at the very least. If it were that easy to game the results, you'd only find spam in search results. SEO is utter trash. The only way to rise in search results is to create rich content, bring users to your site, and create this rich content on a consistent basis. This is also known as, the elusive and rare, "Having a decent website you actually put work into." Crazy idea, I know...
From some research on Google Patents, the best way to jump ahead in Google search results is to grow your site organically, there aren't any magical keyword or link incantations or special header HTML one can call on to give your site that search boost to propel it to the top, it just won't happen.
The funny thing is, SEO's make tons of money every day by scamming people out of their hard-earned cash by promising them a number one spot in search results. At one point in time, there were plenty of people making huge amounts of money from astrology, fortune telling, and alchemy. SEO is the exact same 'science'. These internet 'magicians' promise clients huge traffic boosts out of arcane, secretive methods, that are far, far too complicated for the average person to learn. I'm sure we've all heard these stories before.
There are ways to help content become searchable, but a company buying out keywords from linkfarms does nothing to get the top spots from Google. Buying advertising is another thing entirely. Sure, spend thousands on AdWords, it WILL drive traffic, but those aren't search results, those are sponsored positions.
Just like those (at one point) 'sciences' of centuries past, plenty of people put in plenty of time and made plenty of money, bit in the end, was anything really accomplished? No.
Don't get caught up in this same trap.

Even with my beliefs, the fact remails: There are TONS of people out there that build entire careers out of becoming SEO ninjas. To them, its a real job, doing market research, finding keywords, categorizing and saving backlinks, and using all of these at the proper time to avoid being categorized as spam. They own tons of domains and use various page layout techniques and keyword frequencies to get their job done.

But does it actually work? My money says, 'No'. But it does raise some interesting questions about search engines, web design, spam, and risk management. As web designers and construction-workers of the internet, we should ask ourselves these questions:

• What works better? Raising a site organically, or building a site using a highly-organized series of backlinks?
• Does repeating keywords drive traffic?
• Will the new Google Caffeine make old, keyword-heavy content obsolete?
• Do you see keyword-heavy or link-heavy pages as spam?
• Can Google (or any other search entity) be gamed for a significant profit?
• Is it worth the risk? If a site is flagged as spam on Google, you can guarantee the website is losing out on much more than it could ever gain.

Go ahead and post your answers in the comments, and if you want, ask your own questions as well! Questions like this are important to the foundation of the internet and how we think about search and quality content. One thing is for certain: These aren't easy questions to answer, and I don't believe any one person is qualified to answer them, but its the thought that counts.

When is Good?

Have you ever wanted an easy way to set up a time to meet somewhere, do a project, plan a big dinner, or just about anything else that involves a group of people with busy schedules? If your group is part of the digital age, plan your next dinner party/act of terrorism with When is Good. A very simple site, but it does the best job of getting you an answer with the least amount of hassle, you don't even have to register!

First: Choose some dates and times that work for you by clicking them.

Next: Write down your super secret code (remember, you don't have to register!).

Then you'll receive some links to throw around. Need to change the event? No problem! Just be warned though... any already submitted responses will be deleted. Send the invites off and wait for everyone to chime in!

When you get responses, When is Good will bring up a helpful little chart of who can and can't make it.

If your invitees leave comments, you'll be able to see those as well with a mouseover.

Click on a day, and a synopsis of who can and can't make it will pop up. Leaving you the amazing task of who you should leave behind.

And that concludes the screenshot tour of "When is Good" . A simple little web app that comes in handy just often enough to be of use.

http://www.whenisgood.net/

Pipl - The People Search Engine

    By now you all know that courts make their records public for those over the magical age of 18. If you've ever received a speeding ticket, you're in a publicly accessible internet database with the charge plastered all over some webpage. But how much information is truly out there about you? And more importantly, how easily accessible is it? If you've ever googled your name, you've either been totally creeped out, or more likely, reassured. Google does a lot of things very well, the one thing they suck at is people search. I can search all day on Google for Tom Webster, and I think I'm the 18th on the list. Not bad... but most everything else in the search results are not me. Granted.. those with a more common name will be harder to search out, but Google doesn't index court records, and if they do, they don't do it very well. Pipl (pronounced "people") is more than just a public records search engine, its (as the name implies) a search engine if you're looking for one thing and one thing only: A person. Pipl searches not only court records, but they also search public government databases, tons of social networking websites, photo websites (such as flickr), LexisNexis, Amazon.com public wish lists, and many other places to grab information about a particular person. Its an absolutely amazing tool if you're an employer, and a terrifying tool if you're a person who's running from what's available in the public record. Pipl is a wonderful technical achievement for making information more easily accessable, but its also a bit unnerving. I have a FriendFeed Profile which I laughably nickname "Stalker 2.0", but its never quite revealed this much information. Again.. the less common the search term, the better results you'll get. Try it out! I'm sure you'll be digging up terrible family secrets in no time!

http://www.pipl.com