False Positives

Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is a new FireFox (versions 1.5 and greater) extension released by Google, and developed by Glen Murphy, which shows you what bloggers around the world are saying about the current url you are viewing, using the indexs of Google’s Blog Search.

It was inspired by Aaron Boodman (well known for this work on GreaseMonkey), who cames across ( and was inspired by) comments I made in November 2004 on the old FalsePositives blog on blogger : Looking for FireFox / Mozilla extensions for Del.Icio.us and Technorati, about a system to find and display commentaries on the current web page, using the Technorati index. I also mentioned some other work done towards this in Illuminating the Web, with GreaseMonkey

Very Well Done Glen! The visual design of the extension is nice. However: the “add comments” allows you to add a post on your Blooger blog onl; and “1 of Many” is too cute, tell me how many, Give me “1 of 7″

Add this to a bunch of other Google releases : a FireFox extention for Safe Browsing, protection agianst phishing or spoofing sites; and the Google Homepage API allows you to create sharable Javascript modules that can personalize the Google Home page. (this will be come more important when calendar.google.com finally surfaces.)

Update: Technorati Niall Kennedy makes some good points in Technorati Web Comments for Firefox about how heavy handed Google’s terms of service for this extension is (and I can’t think of any FF extension that had any terms of service before). Yes, I would like to see the a Web Comments for Firefox with full support for the MetaWeblog API, so I could point it at the index of my choice.

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Jason Kottke has a cool idea : Sweethearting:

Here’s a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to “ping” someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.

in part 2 Jason mentions SMS.

here’s my idea of how this might work:

the “easiest” way to do something like this would be if you could store/save a SMS message and destination.

for example
#4 send a text msg “Gone 2 Lunch “to the phone number of my wife
and #5 “Back from Lunch”
and of course #69 “call me when you can” to my mistress’s phone number….(just kidding)

so 2 keys # and a number - plus maybe a confirm? - and I have a set of
quick ping messages.

Doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to implement it on top of a celphone standard SMS service.

Questions :

Do any of the texting services allow anything like this?
could you write, and install on your own cel anything like this?
and how to get a service to implement anything like this?

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Back in April 2004 I wrote about Other uses for the Google Operating System, or the Google Space when Gmail (Googles mail service) was first in limit release, and now this week we have seen a) a major update to the Google Desktop and b) the launch of Google Talk.

Googles Desktop is important because it includes sidebar a place where a panel on your desktop provides convenient, one-glance access to all sorts of personalized information including: Email (Outlook) integration and offline Gmail searching, API support, better encryption, QuickFind, and the abliity to add / build more plug-in’s.

Google Talk is a IM (Instant Messaging) and Chat VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) client. It uses the standard Jabber / XMPP protocol for authentication, presence, and messaging, and all you need is a Jabber-compatible IM client (like iChat) and a gmail account. Here’s 2 review’s : 1 and 2.

The supplied Google Talk client also works with your gmail email account, and the Google Desktop sidebar includes a Google Talk plug-in. The circle is complete.

Where is this all going? Does the Gdesktop (GTop?) become, more and more, your integration place. Is this the rise of the WebOS as Jason Kottke talks about. And Yahoo’s buy of Konfabultor leads to the same place.

Looks like we are moving from a OS-centered to a network-centered world. Can this be good for MicroSoft?

More :

• Speculations on the Google Wallet
• August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web
• Dare Obasanjo : The Evolution of AJAX: Jason Kottke Beats Me To The Punch

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Back in November 2004 I made some mention (or Looking for FireFox / Mozilla extensions for Del.Icio.us and Technorati), inspired by Phil Windley’s Technometria about a system to find and display commentaries on the current web page.

Think of this as being the web equivalent of Illuminated Manuscripts, or commentaries (or side chatter).

Aaron Boodman, aka youngpup, saw some merit in the idea, but then got distracted with a new job and a little thing called GreaseMonkey.

We have Progress ! In July, Matthew Gertner and Stef Magdalinski relased TechnoProxy at Peer Pressure, and Chris Were Greasemonkey with Technorati, which both are Greasemonkey script that inserts information from Technorati onto every web page you visit:

There is a difference: the TechnoProxy uses the Technorati API which requires at API key with a limited number of “uses” per key. To get around having to include their Technorati API Key in the source code they require it (the gm script) to query a proxy on their server (see Greasemonkey and the Death of API Keys), which does resolve the security issue (and opens others), but must come a resource hit for them (bandwidth/ server io etc). And the API Key still runs out of juice. youngpub suggests Why not have users get their own keys?. At minimum they could release a gm script with requires you to add your key. Either of which would solve the Key security and the juice problems (for us if not Technorati!, which can be a little slow these days).

Chris Were’s script doesn’t have this issue because he does not use the API, “just” calling http://www.technorati.com/search/ and displaying the results.

So at least we have a couple of good prototypes for this future “Web Illuminator” (™ pending), which should show up in the sidebar area, and may or may not use technorati as its engine.

Peer Pressure also created WikiProxy: Greasemonkey Edition, which hyperlinks the current page with a list of head phrases from the Wikipedia database. Very similar to my brain fart in Accelerando Technical Companion about using :

Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit……..as an addition to my ExoCortex …I could use this….I was thinking (I know, I know) building a Accelerando vocabulary and using GreaseMoney to build a Hyper-glossary of the html texts…hmm…

Running the WikiProxy against Charle Stross’s recent accelerando Illuminates the Serdar Argic mention but misses the Nicolas Bourbaki referrance because its says “ Bourbaki math borg.” (too clever for it!). Still way kool! I am so going to be looking at that WikiProxy code! Plus, this is another sort of “Illumination”! And in a roundabout way youngpup has delivered, I love it when a lazy web request plan comes together.

Sept 6th update : a new Mozilla/Firefox extension Dictionary Tooltip ( Press ctrl+shift+D (or) double-click after selecting a word to see its meaning. ) is very handy. Its using The Free Dictionary as it’s primary source, but will let you inquire the Wikipedia when it fails to grok the word. Less intrusive than the WikiProxy’s markup, the double click is still easy to use (and can be diabled in the options).

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