Hello161

Ironically considering the subject matter after about a dozen attempts last night this entry failed to post more than Zippy’s picture on the now utterly shambolic Yahoo. Readers I have remained fairly tight lipped about the 360 transition in fact I think these entries are the only mentions I’ve given it. I have kept quiet because I can’t imagine how me giving it a rake over could be a riveting read . Also as the owner of two 360 groups I don’t want anyone getting the idea that my own posts on this topic consist of anything more than conjecture and guesswork on my part. Believe me I’m not privy to more details than anyone else. However it’s about time Stu’s Blog had a say about all this so with a liberal dusting of words like caution, throwing and wind, I shall begin raking and whingebagging So how do I see it? Well let’s start with the recently dropped hot potato that they call Mash. Apparently Yahoo wants to open up and more importantly in terms of ad revenue be the main start and return to point for all your intertube needs Just as Facebook allow outsiders to add restricted and pre structured code to their site in the form of applications, Yahoo wants you to be able to see similar on your main web screen start page Note A . All this sort of stuff needs testing, one to check that consumers like it and two to see if developers are willing to work with it.…it appears where Mash was concerned that a resounding no was the answer on both counts. My guess is that Yahoo dramatically misinterpreted the market research and site data from 360 and the unprecedented number of angry comments about Mash and the fate of 360 spread all over every Yahoo property on the web genuinely took them by surprise. I think it was believed that 360 was just a quick drop in and out portal and the short attention span tea break type shallow content provided by Mash would be more than enough to satisfy 360 users as part of a ‘universal profile’ The recent decision to shut Mash down completely has in effect insulated the future universal profile system from the barrage of criticism and scorn that was directly aimed at Mash Note B I can’t believe that the feedback from Mash and 360 will be totally ignored, for the simple reason that Yahoo have actually shown some sense recently…hard to imagine but true. We were told that Yahoo groups would be moved over onto a groups beta system, I even created a test group on the new platform to get familiarised with it because they actually stated point blank that all groups would eventually be forced to swap over. In short people didn’t like it, it wasn’t all bad but you had to think why change? Why go to the trouble when the new system offered no real advantages over the current one, was buggy and ultimately might alienate a lot of users . What happened after nearly 12 months of beta testing was a change of direction, the beta test was scrapped and all groups that had been taking part or had been created on the new groups platform were moved to the existing (classic) groups format, with promises that what had been learnt would be incorporated in the classic groups in an ‘evolutionary way’…(but as yet I think even Mr C. Darwin himself would struggle to find evidence of any beta incorporation.) Similar things have gone on since the release of the new Yahoo mail, with a lot of people preferring the old faster (classic) mail it was kept going and now classic mail is being actively developed again... So I look at 360 and the fact that it should have transitioned in the early part of this year. We were told that it is no longer being ‘fixed’ or ‘maintained’ or worked on. Well newsflash for you all it is. Sizeable chunks of the 360 program code appear to have been rewritten. People say that the 360 mailbox is not working properly..I can’t send graphics anymore etc,, wrong. It is now working exactly as they intend it to because it’s using an updated mailbox program so the loophole that allowed you to add html is no longer there. My own exploit of the blast messages for iframes and animated themes which ultimately led me as far as full javascript injection and xss was also closed a couple of months later Note C . I am now asking myself why did they bother? Why work on 360 to address these vulnerabilities at all if it is being transitioned, why as the product blog stated add more servers to cope with demand, why introduce 360 plus for certain countries if everyone is going on to a universal profile? Further evidence of them ‘not working’ on 360 is evident this week. My footnotes and image positioning code is now being ‘sanitized’, so are slideshows and videos. In short the servers seem to be running a new stupidly tight or extremely badly written script when you view from the main 5 entries at a time page, but strangely enough not if you view through the single blog/comment/permanent link. Is it actually possible that they are listening to users after all and a lot of 360 will be incorporated as it is in to the new Yahoo. Have they got time to give us ‘plenty of notice’ if the second transition date is now 2nd half 2008? Dare I say it but could there even be room for a 360 ‘classic’? Like I said. Just my thoughts on it. Footnotes:- Note A Or your desktop or your cell phone, or your virtual reality glasses or whatever else you connect to the web on…The big difference though is whereas Facebook/Myspace et al are destinations on the web or places you go to Yahoo appears to want to offer all this stuff in the place you start from…I don’t really see much benefit to this grand plan to be perfectly honest, just because Yahoo’s site stats don’t show that I regularly return to the the UK and Ireland homepage from (say) Yahoo mail doesn’t mean I’m not using it, I am returning but I’m leaving the mail open in its own tab and returning in a fresh one…the same with groups and with 360, when I’m on the web these three sites are invariably left open constantly in separate tabs. I’m willing to bet that most people who use mail/360/groups/answers/my yahoo/chat/etc do the same, If I’m right a significant amount of user research data showing navigational paths and non referred hits are virtually worthless. Return to blog whence you came Note B Despite delusions of grandeur from the interns who were handed the task (assignment? project? workshop? teambuilding exercise?) that was developing Mash, I’d hazard a guess they believed it would eventually spectacularly morph into the backbone of the new UPS at a glitzy public unveiling of some sort, overwhelming hostility towards the whole thing soon made it obvious that it would probably only ever amount to an elaborate test bed for developer modules. Return to blog whence you came Note C At the time I was working with an anti troll and spam quick comments box add on that mapped visitors and added their ip address to their comment…Ok maybe that was pushing the privacy boundaries a bit further than Yahoo are comfortable with but never the less, serious recoding was done on the 360 servers to prevent me doing it. Incidentally I have since added the same code to my geocities guestbook with the result that it has stopped spam postings on that dead…From a constant 3 or 4 attempts a week over the last six months or so. (if you do follow that link by the way it will show you your ip address, however the only way anyone else will see it is if you actually post a comment. It’s not the same as the automatic ip address collectors used by a lot of page visit counters etc ) Return to blog whence you came Footnotes errr footnote. If you wish to make use of footnote links or see this post or any of my others as they are supposed to look be with full gadgetry and foolery your best bet at the moment seems to be clicking on the comments buttons so you are reading individual entries.

Chrome flake

Hello readers, seeing as this is the ‘grown up’ version of Stu’s Blog and posts here are ummm a little thin on the ground I thought perhaps a review..no that’s too strong a word, an opinion on the shiny new browser Google are touting as the future might just sit nicely in this non Yahoo portion of my cyberspace.
I downloaded Google Chrome pretty much as soon as it was available, as I like many others had been chomping at the bit (and bytes..groan) to give it a test drive. Ok so I lie, I accidentally found it available to download and I only heard about it on the off chance as I was reading some other boring techy news. However, this gave me a head start as it were on the rest of the amateur reviewing blogosphere as an early adopter and I stuck with it for a couple of days as my main browser to put it through its paces.
So what do I think? Well it’s easy to use, fast to install, its not a humungously large download that is likely to max out your broadband limits, in fact you could probably even manage it on dial up (note a).
The first thing I noticed when using it was that it came up on stat recording sites as Safari…Now before you say anything I happened to be on a site just which had one of these little widgets below on it as I was surfing around and as history etc is all moved over to Chrome when you install one of the first things I clicked on was recent history to fetch up some real world sort of test pages. I may fall into the category of mildly knowledgeable when it comes to computers but don’t peg me with the Klingon speaking, historic battle re-enacting, dungeons and dragons playing types… I do have the big four browsers on my laptop, but this is to help me troubleshoot my own webpages and javascripts… stopping now before I paint completely the wrong impression of myself.
Where was I…oh yes Safari, Chrome apparently is partly Safari, although which part I couldn’t tell you. Considering all the Mac camp hype and general rubbishing of Microsoft from all quarters I personally held out high hopes when I heard there would be a version of Safari for Windows. I thought it would be an insight in to how the ‘elite’, the ‘other half’ live. I reality I don’t like Safari at all, In fact I hate it, cumbersome buggy, big advert platform for Apple products that it appeared to be. (note b). Fortunately Chrome feels nothing like Safari to use so in the browser ranking stakes for me at least that alone is enough to lift it out of last place.
With a definite advantage over Safari then Chrome on my computer is going to have to compete for valuable real estate space on my taskbar with IE and Firefox. Although Opera can be handy for certain things it doesn’t offer anything special that regularly makes me click the icon before the top two.
The popularity of IE and the usefulness in terms of add ons of Firefox make for quite formidable opponents. The apparent importance of browser market share charts suggest to me that it is believed most people use a single browser and there is therefore distinct camps and allegiances a la PC v. Mac when it comes to how they view the web. I would guess though that most people savvy enough to give open source a try are now quite happily using both Firefox and IE side by side.
There’s no doubt about it Chrome is quite pleasant to look at (or through as they like to claim) Minimalistic I believe is the word for it. This I like. The less clutter in and around my interweb screen the better, that way there is more room for the page itself. I can’t understand people who have half a dozen toolbars stacked up top and end up looking through a letterbox...
Chrome’s claim to have loads of separate memory spaces to prevent it failing means little to me, I honestly can’t remember the last time IE7 or Firefox crashed on me. Slightly more useful though and presumably made possible by separate memory spaces is the ability to drag tabs outside the current window and spawn an entire new window. There is also incognito mode which seems to be the equivalent of turning cookies off deleting all history and files automatically and surfing through a web proxy…porn mode in other words… then again anyone savvy enough to be trying new browsers is most likely capable of anonymous surfing should they feel the need
There are unfortunately a couple of things that irritate me with Chrome.
One is the window scrollbar and its apparent inability to scroll back up using the click and drag function on the scroll wheel of a mouse, or the nifty finger slide on the side of my laptop touchpad. On the pain in the arse scales it ranks about the same as trying to get your Venetian blinds to lock in just the right position half way up the window pane. I appreciate its beta and apparently this is a known fault but ffs screwing up such basic interaction with the user? Definite schoolboy error…and remember its first impressions that count. Slightly higher up the P.I.T.A. scale is the bookmarks (that would be favourites to those of IE upbringing). Why so? Well although Chrome is supposed to be intelligent, with 9 of your most frequent pages brought up for your clicky pleasures when you open a new tab (there is no home page as such which in itself I’m not sure if I like the idea of) everything in Chrome is in effect at least one extra click further away than it should be. Bookmarks require you to click before you can get to them…and I mean every time…you can’t leave them hanging conveniently at the side of the window. Ok there is a bookmarks bar on which you can fit a few as buttons but if you are like me with lots of bookmarks organised in folders… I’m also going to have to say that certain websites just don’t look right when viewed with Chrome. This may be the fault of poor css on the part of the sites themselves, like when link colours etc are left in the hands of the browser but when for instance Ebay has text that has you squinting to read because it’s too small…
If you work on the three strikes and you are out principle things certainly don’t bode well for Chrome…
It could do well if Google continue to promote and develop chrome. At one stage it had a money can’t buy download link on Googles famously uncluttered and ad free home page. With exposure like that I can’t imagine anything failing. However being brutally honest, it has nothing more (in fact probably less) to offer than IE7 or Firefox. Considering that IE8 is nearly upon us, and Firefox 3 is now polished and useful enough for the more mainstream user I’m afraid that Chrome needs to be give me something much more spectacular or innovative before I’m willing to even rate it above Opera never mind in the top two.




Note a

Although why you would want a new browser if you are on dial up could be a bit of bit of a conundrum Back to blog.

Note b

Before you Mac freaks jump on me here extolling the virtues of Steve Jobs product lines first impressions count. My first impression when I booted up Safari was ‘big advert for I tunes’…and first impressions I’m afraid count big. And although all things born at imaternity are supposed to be aesthetically pleasing I still look at Safari and think it’s just out of focus…Back to blog.

Certain things

Like it happens to have a built in torrent client…not a lot of people know that but instead of infecting your ‘puter with whatever file sharing software is flavour of the month, point opera at a torrent and bingo instant ENapwire… Back to blog. (these links are probably more helpful than usual if you are reading this with chrome...)