Alcides Fonseca

The biggest social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have operated mobile sites long before anyone ever held an iPhone. Midsize social networks are still warming up to the concept: Hi5, a San Francisco-based company that counts its biggest following in Latin America, formally launched Hi5 Mobile on Tuesday.

The social site has launched its mobile edition in 26 different languages, a testament to its multicultural image, and has optimized it for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and select handsets from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung. Those translations, Hi5 says, are done on the part of locals rather than the company to make the site more "culturally relevant."

But more importantly, Hi5's mobile site is a marketing effort to reach its most loyal customers. MySpace and Facebook's current mobile sites are intended as supplements to the browser-based editions, but Hi5 openly targets the "millions of international users who primarily use mobile devices, instead of a personal computer, to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues." After all, access to PCs is less common in many Latin American countries than in Hi5's home country.

Recent statistics from ComScore indicate that Hi5 has doubled its visitor count over the past year and that much of its foothold is in Latin America; the social-networking industry in that region of the world has grown by a third since mid-2007, according to the same statistics.

While other social networks like MySpace are working hard to make headway in the Latin American market (and MySpace says its market share there is growing), launching a mobile site is a savvy move on Hi5's part.

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The Embedder’s Guide does contain a lot of good information you can use to get started embedding SpiderMonkey into your application. It’s worth a read if you’re looking for a decent scripting engine for your app.

There have been a pile of posts about the TraceMonkey code that just landed in mozilla-central. mozilla-central is the source code repository we’re using in the lead up to Firefox 3.1. Here are some posts if you want to read about it:

• Brendan Eich: TraceMonkey: JavaScript Lightspeed
• John Resig: TraceMonkey
• Mike Schroepfer: What can you do when your browser is 7 times faster?
• Mike Shaver: The birth of a faster monkey
• Ryan Paul: Firefox to get massive JavaScript performance boost

The heart of the story is that we’re seeing performance increases on benchmarks of anywhere from 1.8x to 37.5x depending on the benchmark used.

But the thing that most people don’t realize is that you can take advantage of the work that we’re doing in SpiderMonkey in your program as an embedded JS interpreter. It’s a pretty tiny engine, has a relatively stable API and even has useful documentation. John’s post contains four commands that you can use to build the engine. In fact, it’s so short, I’ll re-paste it here:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
cd tracemonkey/js/src
make -f Makefile.ref BUILD_OPT=1
Linux_All_OPT.OBJ/js -j

And you’re in a command line JS interpreter. No fuss, no muss.

Many people don’t realize it but most of what people think of as JavaScript is the browser API, not the JavaScript language. To quote from the JavaScript C Engine Embedder’s Guide:

The word JavaScript may bring to mind features such as event handlers (like onclick), DOM objects, window.open, and XMLHttpRequest. But in Mozilla, all of these features are actually provided by other components, not the SpiderMonkey engine itself. SpiderMonkey provides a few core JavaScript data types—numbers, strings, Arrays, Objects, and so on—and a few methods, such as Array.push. It also makes it easy for each application to expose some of its own objects and functions to JavaScript code. Browsers expose DOM objects. Your application will expose objects that are relevant for the kind of scripts you want to write. It is up to the application developer to decide what objects and methods are exposed to scripts.

The Embedder’s Guide does contain a lot of good information you can use to get started embedding SpiderMonkey into your application. It’s worth a read if you’re looking for a decent scripting engine for your app.

I don't know why I continue to beat up on The House Bunny in the comic. I saw it on Saturday with Cami and my sister-in-law and it's a perfectly serviceable film. There's nothing new about the plot, though. It's basically Revenge of The Nerds with hot pants. Frankly, one wonders if you couldn't accuse screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith of self-plagiarism. The two wrote Legally Blonde back in 2001 and The House Bunny shares a similar feel. The major difference being that Reese Witherspoon's Elle Woods was actually a very intelligent and driven young woman with a fluff exterior. Anna Faris as Shelley Darlingson is a dyed-in-the-wool moron that ends up being more heart than brains.

Both seem to have an affinity for naming their pets cutesy names. "Bruiser" for Woods's chihuahua in Legally Blonde. "Pooter" for Darlingson's cat in The House Bunny.

The other big difference, of course is that Legally Blonde is the far superior movie. At least it had a plot that kind of makes sense. The House Bunny is all over the place and edited terribly. There are huge logic gaps in the film, sacrificed, I suppose to make room for "The Positive Message" at the end of it.

I kind of left the theater wondering who this movie was supposed to be for. Was it meant for geeky girls to teach them how to embrace their inner sexpot? Or was it for vapid, materialistic hard-bodies to teach them how to crack open a book every once in a while.

The movie leaves you hanging on a string for most of the second act. After the geeky girls of the Zeta house get their makeover, they become superficial snobs, no better than their adversaries-- and you wonder "Oh my God. Is the movie going to leave them like this? Could these characters realistically abandon a lifetime of social awkwardness and rebellion after one application of lip gloss?"

As clumsy as the movie is when it finally comes around to delivering it's message, the girls would have been better off left as bubbleheads.

I wanted to like The House Bunny more than I did and I think a lot of that is based on the strength of the performances between Faris and Emma Stone. Faris has created a great screen ditzoid, you just wish she had a better script to do it in. Emma Stone is completely natural as the over-compensating geek. She speaks and you cringe, but for a good reason - because her acting nails that awkwardness so perfectly.

Maybe The House Bunny is a better movie than I give it credit for because I've actually been giving it a lot of thought over the last couple of days. There are quotable lines from the movie and a few strong laughs. But it feels like it was assembled so hastily, it's like a missed opportunity for Faris and Stone.

I have more to say about the film, especially regarding some of the supporting performances. Specifically, Kat Dennings, who I think was woefully miscast. I'm sure it's something we'll be talking about in greater detail tonight on The Triple Feature podcast at 9PM CST over at TalkShoe. If you're interested, please tune in and contribute to the conversation. We'd love to have you!

See you then!