So, three days ago I got an invite to Google+

I already heard about its roll out before, and actually was anticipating when deciding where to upload photos for public sharing (taken by my new Android Phone which is a separate story). Facebook is not public enough, I want to leave my DeviantArt account for Flash stuff mostly etc etc. So I went for Google Picasa app to organize my photos and upload some to Picasa Web Albums. Little bit more about it later.

What Google+ is

In short I would say that Google+ is holy union of  Twitter+Blog+Facebook. Why? There is written much about various feature of Google+ on the wen but I will stop at those who appeal to me:

• Privacy and visibility. Google+ has a built in people grouping called Circles which servers two purposes. Filtering network content by Circles. And filtering visibility of content you publish by Circles who will see this content. Second purpose allows you to both leave personal messages, share things with family, or share with anybody. In this sense it is more or less similar to Facebook. But Google+ has a broader visibility called “Public” which is accessible to whole Internet. And it is a Twitter/Blog like improvement over a Facebook that I always lacked. In these sense while Facebook is walled off and feeds on the web Google+ allows to give back to the web. It is a very significant and key feature to me.
•   Asynchronous relationships. While Facebook allows only friends status, Circles are asynchronous. Someone can add you to their Circle, but you may not add him. What it means? He will “follow” your public posts but will not see posts you made for your circles. So it allows broadcasting relationship. Facebook allows this trough Pages though.
• +1 a Facebook “like” competitor Google rolled out earlier. Now it gains a lot more sense for users to use as it is a fast small sharing of what you liked. So now users have reasons to do it. Now I do, while before I was not doing it.
• Authorship. Google raised a playing field around content author marking. Now recognized authors behind content are shown in Google search results. I think it can have a pretty big consequences for accountability of content. Now you can go and see contents author public account on Google+, potentially see his interests, employers, bias
• HangOut – a much mentioned feature based on a google video plugin. Managed to get a taste of it only yesterday. Some may call it a SkyPe killer but I don’t. It is an up to 10 people video chat app in a browser. My experience with it I could be put in short like “SkyPe made fun”. After it SkyPe feels like a strict, uptight business meeting application. I don’t know what Google did on usability(and I will need to investigate it later) but HangOut feels light, fast, and… fun… It feels like a party at friends place, you just jump in, start discussing, sharing, watching synchronized(rewinding and video itself) youtube video, jump out. Then jump in again. So, HangOut is not a SkyPe killer. They are different. You can’t use HangOut for some things you use SkyPe for and reverse is also true.
• Gorgeous public photo galleries. I did mention it above. Here are some photos taken by my SGS2 android phone. Not big implications with this feature, just best looking galleries I seen so far in social networks. Have a suspicion that it is Microsoft inspired as looks similar to Windows Phone 7 interface. But I guess Microsoft was inspired by some sites too.

I think those are first things that come to mind after using Google+ for few days. I guess you can already see how with “public for web” posts it serves as twitter and blog, while with privacy and Circles it serves as a Facebook.

What Google+ can become

I talked about things on the surface. But some linger in the future or under the surface. It seems to me that with this move Google has chances of making internet truly social in a way Facebook never could  because of its more closed nature. Google+ gives back to the web. Also Google now can use +1 and authorship to effect search results and rankings. Which can solve some of Google search quality problems. I do hope though that they will allow turning +1 effect on and off to get “unbiased” results.

Also trough same +1 Google gets their hands on one of most crucial things for recommendations. Lists of things people like. Now Google can start providing similarity browsing and recommendations on all fronts. I do think that +1 in such context is the most important feature for Google, and us. Its a feedback we are giving to the Google so that it can improve its offering to us.

Problems

Nothing is perfect so here we go:

• Its little bit confusing. Already seen people who are very computer savvy misunderstanding how asynchronous part of Circles work. What will your granny understand then?
• Privacy control is not fine grained enough. Like two examples from my experience. I post a public photo for web to see, and friend or even girlfriend posts a personal joke for example. Now whole world sees it. Why? Because comments inherit privacy status from parent post. So you are ending up with a choice of “too public” and “too censored” sometimes. Another example are people in your circles. You can choose what circles are shown(all or say celebrities you follow) and how public it is(only your family or whole world?). But you can’t make it so that whole world sees people you follow while your family sees all. And there are many other such small but very significant privacy control issues. Hope they will fix them. I sure am sending them feedback on all occasions BTW their feed back is awesome, never seen anything like this.
• There is also one two sided problem, dependency or coupling. One of biggest advantages over other firms Google always had is that its a multiheaded hydra. All projects drift independently not hurting and rarely improving each other. Well it started to change a little before but now it clearly comes to an end as Google+ seems to be posed to bring it all together. And some of us know how well it works for Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple. They ruin separate projects and user experience to tie  down their offering together, locking they users to use them together. I really hope it is not a fate that awaits Google and all its users. Though I already heard of bad consequences of this for some people. Mostly on a side of Google merging all kind of accounts across all its products in to one account.

There is more of course, but service is only rolling out and I hope they are working on a clock of addressing it as I think Google+ has a big big potential. So far my feelings are similar to Google Wave roll out. I am very excited and pumped up as I never really liked Facebook, and do like Google+ a lot. But there is a crucial difference with Wave and Google+ for me. Wave was all cool and hypish as is Google+, but with Wave I entered few times, played with it and rarely returned since. Google+? I am using it each day now, publishing photos, cross posting from Facebook, started using +1, and am working on adding some of Google+ related feature to my blog and page. So, my use of it differs a lot, hope Google+ future will differ a lot too. So far there are claims that they already reaching 20 millions.

So 2010 is almost over and 2011 is almost here. Another year have gone by. First thing first:

Happy New Year everyone Here as part of my audio visualization journey made Musical Fireworks, enjoy(click picture to see it):

Year summary

And now to summarize on how things went this year for me. Wanted to collect in one place where I was at the beginning and where I am now and for now not precisely but say where I want to go next year.

Work

Little bit longer then a year I am working at innoWate nad am programming Flash games for social networks like Facebook and Vkontakte.

It was rich in experience year:

• I participated in making two social games directly and helping indirectly in making few others
• Learned pretty much about social network APIs that are mostly inspired by Facebook
• Learned about many Flash bugs, inconsistencies, performance issues and some workarounds for them

That are good parts   Now some stats

On 12 Aprila of 2010 I installed Procastitracker at work, this software allows me to see how much time I spend in what applications so what we have there:

• 170 working days since April, two weeks of vacation in August, seems about right
• 1414 working hours over those 170 days

That makes something like 8 hours 20 minutes of average working time per day or 54 hours of overtime…

In what applications it was spent:

• 535 hours spent in Firefox
• 356 hours spent in Flash Builder 4
• 176 hours spent in SkyPe
• 82 hours spent in Flash Player
• 54 hours spent in Windows Explorer (files/folders stuff)
• 36 hours spent in Flash CS5
• 27 hours spent in Chrome, lately FF become very bad for Flash development, hangs, crashes, lags, few times tried to switch but FF extensions equivalents in Chrome  are not on par yet
• 25 hours spent in FTP manager
• 7 hours in Procastritracker itself

You can see I missed some things here and there + there are things where Procastitracker does not know what I was using. Still I covered 90% of things I guess. So yeah 500+ hours or more then 1/3 of my time is spent in browser, Procastitracker is smart enough to see on which sites too:

• 74 hour on Facebook, testing our stuff, checking competitors stuff, communicating with friends etc
• 62 hour in Vkontakte one of biggest Russian social networks(there are few), mostly testing our games and working with their API
• 49 hour on Google sites, gmail, reader, statistics tools and google  search itself, soon I guess chrome store will become a portion of it too
• 38 hour on DeviantArt, well that’s mostly entertainment stuff, checking works, communicating etc
• 25 hour on private work related sites, various tools, statistics and game deployment tools
• 20 hour on One(local social network), entertainment too, local network, photos, friends, communication too
• 18 hour on Mail.ru, rather new social network from most popular Russian email provider, big player in social arena now too, also testing games and stuff
• 12 hour Odnoklassniki.ru, probably biggest and oldest Russian social network, also worst API in industry, site too, unstable, user unfriendly, really hard to test and use as platform, but also with most active players community it seems
• 10 hour YouTube, hehe
• 7 hour in my blog here
• 4 hour Wikipedia, hmm seems small

It is roughly 60% of spent time in FF, there are a lot of small sites and Procastitracker does not allow to group the efficiently so I have no idea on what kind of stuff rest of time was spent.

Activity on DeviantArt

• Submitted 15 works which 40% less then year back
• Also comments and views fell something like 50%

I really like DeviantArt and its community, sadly DA is stagnating, especially on Flash front. I wonder if at some point they will provide APIs so that people could start creating art related tools around DA platform. In meantime Flash programmers community is weak there, we lack gallery supervisor and position is open, what that means is that there is no one to be a buffer between DA staff and Flash creators community, Flash deviations do not get to Daily Deviation page (front page, best works of the day, nominated by gallery supervisors)  and also community is disorganized. Sad…

This blog

In first half of this year I registered a hosting and domain name, on 17 April I finished with blog preparations and made my first blogpost here. For long wanted personal, customizable blog that is not dependent/hosted on any social or blogging  platform.

• Since then I made 54 post
• There are 33 comments(some are mine in response to other comments)
• I got something like ~5000  unique visits, 27k of visits overall (AwStats)
• Those visits eat ~1.3Gb of traffic making it something like 37Kb per visit
• Also I made PingMap and collected ~2k of unique ip pings to my blog so far
• Also Akismet blocked 239 spam comments

Conclusions

Speaking of work, can’t say I am satisfied on many levels… Its a long talk and I will save it for different time but in short, each celebration in the world is a rush to make new features by that deadline. Planing is chaotic and I am not sure we have people who know what they are doing on game design side. I my self don’t really get appeal of game that companies like Zynga make. Anyways part of this is chaotic feature adding. And result of it all is hard to manage large projects on inside (feels bad for me as a programmer, I want to do my work well but I just can’t in such circumstances, partially I guess I lack experience but still)  and also games I am not proud of  from the outside…

On DeviantArt I guess I need to be more active but lack time. DA is good place for various things and getting audience for some things. Sad for me that I am degrading a little in my activity on DA.

On this blog side, I am more or less satisfied. I did not wrote as much as I would have liked, I have like 10-20 unfinished drafts for posts. Also my post quality is not very good. Bad English sometimes and not very deep posts aether. I want this blog to be more clean and useful to people with similar to mine interests but I don’t have time for that aether.

Next year

As you see from above I must say I am not completely satisfied with last year. I want to do a better job and be proud of things I do for a living. I want  to do more blogging and works for DA and with better quality. I am satisfied with what I was doing but now with how. So for next year I wish and want to do better and I do have some things planed to try and do better.

That’s it. Happy New Year!

Initially I chose WordPress as a bloging platform as I found it to be a lot more polished for numerous purposes and allowed a precise fine tuning with various free plugins and themes. Perfect thing for a “for fun blogging“.

So for a while I wanted to share what kind of stuff I use and for what purposes. I listed them in chronological order as I was installing them. continue reading…

Months ago I wrote about fast, free and simple way of making geolocation from scratch in Flash. Around same time I made a pinger which you can see in right panel. So for approximately half of year I was collecting ips and pings made in flash and in javascript.

Why you may ask? Well For many reasons. To name few:

• I wanted to know how good hosting is and knowing what are pings for my users are an easy ways to judge that. Later on I could also compare how good other hostings are in comparison
• I find it useful overall both to know from where users come + how well it goes for them be it my blog, games or some other future projects
• I also was curious if it will be possible to kind of triangulate position of servers using ping gradients across the world More on that later
• Also it’s kind of a neat feature for the blog, more to write about and share the code + possibly make a plugin for wordpress later(chances are slim though)

So here we go, in those 6 months I got pings from 1000 unique places all around the world so I though that its time to make a map and add it to the blog. And now you can see PingMap here. continue reading…

Last week shortly after I posted this I started to receive something like 50 trackbacks/pingbacks per day that had nothing to do with that post. After little inspection I started to suspect that it was to do with word combination “Flash issues” which may be was considered close enough to “flesh issues” as many of those blogs linking to me were in some way connected to spamming about drugs, operations, body weight loss etc.

What are pingbacks/trackbacks?

They are an automatic feedback mechanic for blogging society. It is automatic way to notify blog posts about them being linked to from other blog posts. Pretty important and useful thing huh?

Problem is about “automatic” part. It just that blogs do it automatically for the user. You linked to some post. Your blog will try to send pingback/trackback comment to it. As it is automatic means to filter them out like CAPTCHAs obviously will not work.

As a first measure I turned off pingback/trackback for that post. Then started to investigate more.

Further investigation

First thing I noticed was that those posts were not linking to me in them. Then little bit below it I noticed “Related blog posts” block where link to my post was listed… At that point some doubt hit me. What if this is some weird blog plugin that for some reason finds my post related to those and trackback/pingback is a side effect. But posts were so different in nature that it was hard to believe that some plugin would fail so miserably. Also those blogs were very weird and spammy in nature so my conclusion was that it is just a tricky way to hide spamming nature of all this. Also I suspected that those links to me were irrelevant and not useful to my blog.

Next thing that I found funny was what happened with visits/traffic to my blog in next days. As this type of spam needed those blogs to link to me to work they also were sending people in my direction too… So visits and traffic jumped some 5x-20x times over what I had before… So why to stop them if they drive traffic my way? Well because those visitors have nothing to do with my blog. They don’t register to RSS, don’t leave relevant comments etc etc… They only eat traffic and don’t bring any value. They are not my clients. It’s like crowds of people interested in drugs come to book store. Book store does not get much from it or rather may even loose real customers…

After some more inspection I found out that 50% of visitors were spending less then 30 seconds on my site and that’s exactly those who are not truly my visitors.

Though there are almost 20% who spend half an hour or even more who probably are my visitors. I am not sure how this info is collected by Awstats so I am not sure.

Anyways it is pretty clear that I don’t want to be involved with that kind of activities.

What I did so far?

So what kind of ways to battle this exist?

First one and one I was using before was CAPTCHA. But as I mentiond it does not and should not work for trackbacks/pingbacks. And that’s something those people exploit.

Another thing I switched on next day after it started was moderation. This way no comment is shown until I personally approve it. I hate that to be honest. On my blog as I need spend time approving them and on other sites as it slows down the communication, adds censorship feeling etc etc. So I did turn it on but it was a temporary solution. In next 3 days I received 150~ spam posts to disapprove.  But at least they were not shown publicly.

Akismet

Another and probably best solution there is to spam is collaborative spam filtering. Something I think first was tried by Google in Gmail. What is aim of spam? To push some information to as many people as possible, to advertise it almost for free this way. Same or almost the same info sent to as many people as possible that don’t want to receive it? Don’t you see some weakness here? What if this mass unwillingness to receive something could be exploited to make something like a learning collaborative spam filtering service? Simply saying imagine it like that. Each mail you receive goes trough service. You receive spam. You mark it as spam. It is sent to a service. Service receives some 100 such  complains for that message. It starts to filter and automatically mark as spam this message for other users. Kind of collaborative filtering. Of course it is not as simple as that but it is part of it.

After looking for a bit I stumbuled on Akismet.  Akismet is a Plugin/Service that works as an automatic filter on comments your blog receives. It marks spam automatically, puts other messages in to custom approval. I am not shore if it can approve automatically without my approval as I did not receive any real comments during that week.  Then when it misses something and you mark it as spam it is sent back to the service to learn. As a result for you and other service users spam detection becomes better. There is a worse situation possible though. It may automatically mark real comment as a spam. In this case you can unspam. As a result such comment will be sent to service to learn that it is not a spam.

In the end it is all about numbers. There are less spammers then their targets so such service succeeds.

I heard about Akismet before but did not had need for it. Now I had need + use case to test it on. How well it performs? So far it filtered out 95% of comments and all 95% were spam as far as I can say. Sadly other 5% it did not filtered out were spam too. Still it is 90-95% less work for me

What now?

Even thought I filter out those comments and they do not get publishes my blog still is mentioned on all those spammy blogs. And I still get way too many irrelevant visits. I wonder when they realize that they are not linked back and do not gain anything from my blog anymore.

But I will be curiously keeping an eye on it all. It is kind of interesting isn’t it?

So yeah. Decided to change it. Sorry if it made little problems with someones RSS feeds, not shore this change reset something for someone. In my experience , sometimes such changes make whole feed to be resent to readers… For example few days ago something happen with ted.com RSS and I got 500 of their videos in to my reader marked as new. I hope it did not happen this time with this feed but even if it did I don’t have that much posted in it.

Also sorry for those who were interested in Flash only section.

Why changing?

Well initially I wanted to have separate sections for for different stuff. May be programming section as a whole, and many subsections of flash/silverlight/html/js/C#/.net/unity etc etc. May be some day I will. Or may be I will turn tags back on. But in short I don’t think I want to have like 20 categories. I somehow want to squeeze my blogging in somewhere below 10 or may be exactly 10 categories. Honestly I think I would have liked tags + tag feed constructor that would allow combing tags using “and” and “or” to make highly customized feeds. It is still possible but there is a problem. And it is connected to Feedburner. Thing is that I did not find automatic way to reroute all possible feeds and their combinations to Feedburner and I don’t think it is possible. And Feedburner is a pretty good feed customization service. Allows statistics, republishing, email subscription, different soc network features embedded in to your feed, google ads in a feed + some services that overall enhance feed integration with different readers. I guess it is possible to collect plugins that would add many of those things too but that’s hard and not 100% possible probably.

Anyways I am getting too much in to the specifics. Shortly things are like this. I don’t want too many categories and allowing tags also makes it harder to integrate with Feedburner which I for time being don’t want to loose.

So I am left with merging categories of similar nature making their scope larger.

Software Development section

Well I already mentioned above that this section will contain a lot more that just Flash now. Basically everything connected to software development including different platforms and languages then Flash ans AS3  (well HTML5/JS in future is a must and I for quite a while wanted to play with Unity too), patterns, data structures etc etc.

Well my first post in this category and it will be related to first thing I ended up customizing to my blog.

I rarely noticed that sites somehow make browsers show small icon stylized to the site design in address bar and in tabs. I always tough that it was set in header of pages and you may set nothing and it will be fine. Well after registering at hostmonster I noticed that on all my pages I have a hostmonster logo as that icon. Quick search revelaed what that icon is and why I had a hostmonster logo everywhere.

Firstly what that logo is. It is called Favicon and you can read more here.

Now about hostmonster and important part. It turns out that this icon is not optional and that browsers(probably not all) ask for in in sites root by default. So if you don’t have any your server will end up returning a 404 error  for each page user opens… Hostmosnter admins did not like that so they made it so that if you lack that favicon they add their logo by default.

If you want to set yours just put favicon.ico file in to the root of your site and that’s it. No need to add it to every page. Though you can change path to it on per page basis using this tag in your pages header:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/path/to/your/favicon.ico” />

Hope you found that useful.

Well for each new category I will be writing a post to introduce what this category is about.

In this category I will write about this blog, blogging in general, wordpress, wordpress plugins and extensions, bloging tips/tricks etc.

That’s all