Neverending Archive

I am making myself available to fill in the shoes of RIM CEO’s for one day. Here’s what I would do:

I would drop the development of the QNX OS and all related systems. The following would be bad for me as a customer, but it makes all sense for RIM. Just fork the Android source tree into a new distribution (but keep updating with upstream) and focus on what RIM is known for:

• Security.
  • Make storage and communication encrypted.
  • Replace google’s services (Gmail, Google Calendar, ...) with RIM’s services, and allow for companies to host them.
  • Make Storage automatically backed up on the RIM/Hosted cloud. Even better: make shared folders like dropbox. Everything encrypted again.
• Administrative tasks
  • Give admins great tools to manage hundreds of blackberrydroids easily.
  • Create a BBAppStore in which apps must be signed by RIM and must follow some standards like encryption, no external communication, etc… (Apps would not be bought individually for $0.99, but rather in bulk for several android terminals at once)
• Communication
  • Make the phones a really damn good email machine. Add a physical keyboard, improve the UI, but make email really easy on the phone. Just like IM.
  • Integrate VOIP really well as if there was no difference between the GSM and VOIP/Skype whatever. This would be a major selling point for companies.
• Office Integration
  • Develop great office suite apps (Word, Excel, Calendar, Mail)
  • Make a great printer (or adapter) that makes printing Documents really easy.
  • Same for scanning. Maybe using the camera and OCR.
  • Integrate well with a projector. People should be able to present with a tablet/phone and no cables.

Today Google discontinued their Social Graph API. For those who didn’t know it, you gave it an url that represented someone (my website, my twitter or facebook account) and it returned all your other URLs (my blog, last.fm, openid, youtube, among many other services) and also URLs for all my friends from all those social networks.

Social Graph API was a way of getting all your presences in the internet and also your friends. This was important for instance, when you signed up for a new account on a yet-another-social-network, it could import all your friends without asking for any permission. Games could suggest your friends as opponents. And services could get updates from all your accounts.

Technically, this was achieved using XFN (a micro-format), FOAF and a few other technologies. This is still possible to do today, but the service provided by Google had the advantage of using their super-duper-make-everything-fast-cache and actually query several URLs in useful time.

But I do understand why Social Graph API didn’t caught up. In 2007, everyone had 1001 profiles. Their photos were on Flickr, videos on Youtube, blogs on wordpresses/blogspot, microblogs on twitter, and so on. Social networks were popping up for everything thing you could think of.

And then Facebook became popular. In one page, you can have your photos, status updates, videos, games you play, and so on. And with a good permission system. I can share some photos with my friends, but not the world. This gave control to the user, and removed information from the public knowledge, and therefore from Social Graph API’s reach.

Users want control over what they share, and I am totally on board with that¹. I am just sorry that all services are being provided by one company and it increases our dependency on Facebook. I wonder how long will it take for someone to improve the experience and create a new exodus from Facebook to a new platform with other advantages. An no, it won’t be Google Plus.

¹Although one should never forget that your trusted contacts can share what you did with the world.

There has some buzz about Reading the source code on the interwebz lately.

As someone who teaches Computer Science, I find that most students finish their degrees without having read a single line of code that was not written by themselves, group partner or professor. And given the huge amount of good-quality open source code on the internet this is a very disappointed fact.

In fact, when they find an error on a 3rd party software (being a dependency, middleware or just a library) they simply block and cannot advance. For instance, when debugging a stack-trace in a Java project, once the methods reach out of the scope of their project and belong to something else, they stop debugging and don’t try to understand what is happening underneath.

And in my experience situations where the answer is not in the documentation, but in the source code, happen at least once a month. In fact, I have up reading the documentation for most libraries in Python or Ruby. I end up just browsing the source to learn how to work with them, it’s must faster for me. Unless they have some really complex algorithm, and then the documentation is a pre-requisite to the source code.