james mckay dot net

My blog entry on Volta, GWT and leaky abstractions has been reproduced in the .NET Developers’ Journal.

This was a particularly interesting post because a lot of people are pretty impressed with Volta, and on the face of it, I was pointing out what I saw as its potential shortcomings. It has also attracted some comments from fairly accomplished developers — Bruce Johnson of Google’s GWT team, and Mats Helander, who wrote one of the first O/R mappers for the .net framework. However, while I may have come across a bit negatively, my opinion is not actually so much an anti-Volta/GWT/RJS one as a pro-JavaScript one. Since I started taking JavaScript seriously a year or so ago, I’ve really started to appreciate it, and to be honest, I think that developers who hide from it altogether behind abstraction layers of whatever nature are really losing out.

I’ve also had an e-mail from a journalist asking me for my opinion on MySpace for an article that she’s writing. I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask on that one to be honest: my experience of MySpace is pretty much limited to opening an account, discovering it doesn’t work with Windows Live Writer, closing it again, getting spammed, and experiencing all the yuk-that-is-gross reactions that any respectable, standards compliant, XHTML addicted web developer experiences on seeing your average profile page with gratuitous background images, animated GIFs, thrash metal background music, and broken rendering in Firefox.

It’s interesting where blogging can take you…

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Posted at 21:51 on 3 February 2008.
Tagged: blogging, GWT, JavaScript, leaky abstractions, MySpace, volta

So I finally succumbed to pressure from my friends and colleagues and got myself onto Facebook. This may come as a bit of a surprise given my rather low opinion of MySpace, but then again, while there are similarities, Facebook is not MySpace.

What is the difference? Two things. One is aesthetics. There are none of these awful seizure-inducing profile pages with illegibly tiny pink text on an orange background, and no annoying background music, and in their place is a slick, clean, responsive, easy to use Ajax driven interface.

The second — and much more important — thing: developers, developers, developers. MySpace has hitherto had something of a reputation for sending in the legal heavies after people who write widgets and add-ons for the platform. Facebook is the exact opposite, and positively encourages it, having released a complete API with full instructions on how to make a Facebook application.

This makes it the Swiss Army Knife of social networking websites, since there is so much that you can do with the platform. You can integrate Facebook with a whole lot of other services such as your own WordPress blog (my own blog posts get reproduced on my Facebook profile via the RSS feed) or even Wikipedia if you are that way inclined. A particularly useful application that has recently been launched is Google Reader Shared Items, which allows you to share interesting items in your RSS feeds with your friends very easily. Scoble loves it.

I think sites such as Facebook are also well placed to supplant e-mail as the primary one-to-one communication means of the Internet. Because you set up a network of friends, there is an element of trust there that makes it much easier to filter out spam, phishing and viruses. Of course, these nefarious characters tend to be a pretty crafty bunch, so vigilance is still necessary, but since there is an identifiable element of trust there, it is easier to filter it out or even block it altogether, by setting your profile so that only people you have accepted as friends can contact you through the system.

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Posted at 23:22 on 16 July 2007.
Tagged: Facebook, MySpace, social networking

I received an unsolicited e-mail from MySpace this morning. Looks like it’s one of their usual circular newsletters. What makes this very strange is that I do not have a MySpace.

Okay, granted, I did have one once upon a time, but I never actually used it, and in the end I cancelled it. I was actually quite forthright in the comment box on the cancel my account option: I said that I have no time for an ad-ridden monstrosity that violates every accessibility guideline in the book and encourages you to parade a total absence of web design skills while encumbering your blog with search engine hostile URLs. They also have a fiendishly complex system for cancelling your account. You have to click through about seventeen “Are you sure?” links, and then they send you an e-mail message, after which you have to click through another “are you sure?” link, then they tell you it will still take 48 hours.

The newsletter very helpfully gives you some instructions on how to stop receiving further e-newsletters from them:

At MySpace we care about your privacy. If you don’t want to receive future MySpace newsletters, change your Account Settings to “Do not send me MySpace newsletters.” Click here to change your Account Settings. You can also contact us with any questions or concerns regarding your privacy at: privacy@myspace.com or write: MySpace.com, 6060 Center Drive, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

Very helpful, I don’t think, given the fact that in theory I no longer have an account at the e-mail address that they sent it to and therefore I can’t log in to change my Account Settings to “Do not send me MySpace newsletters.” I’ve sent an e-mail to privacy@myspace.com asking what they think they are playing at and I await a response. If it mentions viagra, cheap mortgages, OEM software or Britney Spears, I shall be rather upset.

Update 23 Feb: It appears that I am not the only person who has been spammed by MySpace recently. A report by someone else hit the front page of digg.com a couple of days ago.

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Posted at 09:54 on 21 February 2007.
Tagged: MySpace, spam