The adoption of HTML5 and its surrounding cast of powerful new features is going to be a huge boon to web users and points towards a very positive direction for the future of the web. From the smoother interfaces of canvas, local storage enabling offline modes for online email programs and the like seamlessly, online video free of dependencies like Flash, web sockets making the real time web a breeze without all the current AJAX workarounds, and so much more but I’ll save all of those for future posts….

Today I wanted to finish up and release an experiment using the HTML5 Geolocation feature (sticklers, click here), a feature allowing your web browser (with your permission of course) to share your location, enabling any current website to tailor itself right to where you are… a powerful feature for todays increasingly mobile web user.

Why is This Important?

Today this level of convenience, all the applications you use every day seamlessly knowing where you are, is unheard of for the user as well as the web developer outside of proprietary built “apps” on iPhone or Android you need to seek out and download. But little do most people know those web browsers in their pockets on those same devices can do this today, opening the playing field of a personal local experience up to the entire web… no downloads, no waiting, no device lock-in.

The Experiment

My experiment started with a simple need, in the summer I drive a Jeep to work with a soft top and I prefer to have it down as much as possible, I mean sun in Minnesota only happens for a short stint i need to suck it up. What I needed was a simple view of the current temperature, maybe a radar map to look for any rain on the map coming my direction, not a huge list. In the early summer I quickly built a one page HTML and JavaScript mashup using jQuery, HTML5 (or Google Gears as a fallback) and the Weather Underground API to build a web page that did just that, polished it up a bit (let’s call it a working prototype as of today) and hosted it on Google App Engine purely for worry free scalability to show it to you all.

Initially on load my experiment “Weather GEO” asks if I want to share my location, of course I select yes, this allows my browser to pull a location from my GPS, Wifi or internet address depending on what the device sees fit.

It passes that longitude and latitude back to my page’s JavaScript I in turn query Weather Underground for the next two forecast elements and a radar map for that longitude and latitude and display them as soon as they come back…

Pretty slick… solves a problem in a simple way, just one click from a browser bookmark, no custom proprietary “app” code to build and it will work in every browser when HTML5 is fully adopted, but currently works in the major mobile browsers, Android and iPhone, in FireFox 3.5+ and any browser that has Google Gears on the PC, Mac and Linux… thats more than enough for me.

A great example of where the web is going and how progress on open standards like this benefit everyone, give my little experiment a try here http://bctx.info/wx. Let me know how it works for you, if your device is passing your proper location and what you think in the comments. Currently I am seeing the Droid have a problem with the code and have posted to the Android Developers Google Group.

* Ok, technically Geolocation is part of the W3C Geolocation Working Group, not HTML5 but it will largely be implemented with HTML5 so it really has become part and parcel of the browser based future.

I was very excited to not just attend but be a part of Google I/O 2009, Google’s annual developer conference. A Best Buy contingent of Steve Bendt, Gary Koelling and myself as well as uber developers Curtis Thompson and Thomas Bombach made the trip and were part of the Developer Sandbox.

I/O’s Key Points

The keynotes (day 1, day 2) were both great heralding Google’s confidence in the web browser centric future (woo hoo!) powered by what is possible in HTML5, open communications and collaboration systems like the introduction Google Wave and the cloud based power plant that is Google App Engine… among so much more. The whole time they hit hard their belief that developers outside their company, like the ones in the room, are the only way all this becomes possible. They left us inspired for where the web is going and future open architectures we can share versus build ourselves allowing the user, be it the end user or developer, the portability they need… great to see that becoming a reality.

Best Buy and App Engine

Best Buy was asked to come speak about App Engine and our point of view, that we have shared many times, that it projects a strong model for the future of web development that allows the creativity of a web developer to shine through and takes huge infrastructure and scalability best practices from Google and gives them to you on a sliver platter… no pagers to carry and drastically less system set-up and runtime headaches… growing into a true platform as a service not just boxes in the cloud. The Google crew shot a few videos of us, we’ll see what was smart enough to stay off the cutting room floor!

We talked to many in the Developer Sandbox, answering the question “Best Buy? Like you mean the retailer?” more times than I could count
but once we got through that relayed the message that we are out there, experimenting, trying, showing our company what is becoming possible on the web via new methods of getting things done, notably App Engine and open APIs like our own Best Buy Remix. It’s a great time to experiment even… no especially at a large company that can easily slow down as I’ve said here before…

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

…these movements only further speed up rapid evolution on the web, jump in now with two feet because it’s not slowing down any time soon. Experimenting out in front is the key no matter your size.
-Ben

By default the Google App Engine SDK doesn’t run on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope)… You can fix it!

After a little searching I noticed neither posts about this issue nor a quick fix were top of the Google rankings… hoping to resolve that with this post and get all of us Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) users up on App Engine. UPDATE: This post is now first when searching for “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty Problem” and even “App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty” in one day, nice!

Once you download the SDK as usual and run one of your apps on a default Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty install you will see errors galore, you see Ubuntu 9.04 ships Python 2.6 and App Engine is built on Python 2.5 and they are not friendly!

Here is how I got my environment running, I will update the post if I run into further errors.

In a terminal install Python 2.5

They will coexist on the system.

sudo apt-get install python2.5

Edit dev_appserver.py in your google_appengine directory

Change the first line in dev_appserver.py…

#!/usr/bin/env python

….to…

#!/usr/bin/env python2.5

App Engine should now load and run your apps properly!

I believe this is the simplest noninvasive way to let App Engine find what it wants, Python 2.5, and let Ubuntu carry on as it likes with Python 2.6 and beyond. Here is a source on this issue, commenters have many different solutions.

Hope this post helps at least one of you,
-Ben

ConnectTweet is a simple utility built under the concept [reality in my opinion] that all groups, companies or brands are just collections of many people whose passion, ideas and behavior completely shape it. Often those people’s voices are drowned out in communications by a need to feel “official” instead making it feel robotic, monochromatic and cold… this is especially evident as companies are showing up in social mediums like Twitter where forced news releases and push marketing stick out like a sore thumb.

There needs to be a better way for a company to be represented on Twitter by many passionate people on the inside versus a robot or a single voice.

Making it happen with ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet flips that equation for groups and lets the real people all across your organization to show through on Twitter and be your voice. They can have real, human conversations with customers and share their unique perspectives and passion for their work as people at the front lines of your organization. This unique transparency shows the vibrancy that networks like Twitter have is inside your organization it’s just waiting to be shown the light of day.

First, you need to find and tap the passionates… the people all over your organization many of whom may already use tools like Twitter for their own uses, ask them to be your voice, to share openly their perspectives, interesting tidbits (guarantee you will learn something too) and to answer other users questions about the company on Twitter tagging each of their company posts with #companyname.

ConnectTweet can be then setup to gather up the tweets from the approved users and post them to your organization’s Twitter account allowing your followers to clearly see the human voices on the inside and give your organization that true human interface your customer always wanted to see.

A simple example

Below ConnectTweet has posted to the Twitter account of one of my tools a message I relayed from my personal account to let the tool’s approximately 1000 followers know about something cool that just happened. I simply posted this to my account, and the below tweet appeared in @retweetradar‘s stream. If ten people worked for retweetradar.com they all could do the same thing creating an organic stream of information about the site right from the people on the front lines.

ConnectTweet is in a limited Alpha test but I would love to hear if you’d find it useful and would be interested in trying it out.

Then out of the blue I see Robert received a tweet back from Tim O’Reilly with feedback on retweetradar!

I read it, thought about it, and you know he was right on… the mixing of terms, people and links made the cloud too busy and “people” were not the topic of the tweets they we just authors and interested parties… I needed to jump to work couldn’t waste my chance to show Tim and the many others showing attention yesterday what could be done.

I reworked the interface so “people” and “links” had their own area but were still prominent and displayed the top ten of each among a few other minor tweaks. I let Tim know I made some changes, not expecting a response, but par for the course on this odd day I got one! Tim responded that the tool was now more useful to him.

I sent a tweet thanking Tim for taking any time to look at my little app and then sent him the link to my previous post on retweetradar’s launch. I wanted him to understand this wasn’t supposed to be a technical feat but that I was trying to evangelize the use of the amazing tools we have at out fingertips today to create anything we like on the web, in this instance Google App Engine and Open APIs. Suffice it to say Tim got it, as the father of the real concept of Web 2.0 should!

Quite a day indeed… one for the books…
-Ben

So I was getting a little restless and decided to work on another Google App Engine app, this time without all the Python learning curve and with some real world experience with the Google tools under the belt from http://spy.appspot.com. The goal was to see how fast I could go from concept to useful application leveraging a few of the revolutionary tools we all have at our fingertips today. In the end with about one days work an app was released, likely with a few bugs, but some fun things happened and I believe a bit of foreshadowing of the future of building web apps.

The Concept

I had an idea that I really wanted to extract meaning from a large-ish set of social media messages in near real time and visually trend it over time, showing topics heating up in conversations even while still slightly off the conventional news radar. We’ve all seen lately the groundswell social media conversation routinely outpacing tradition broadcast media in speed and openess of accounting, this app would be yet another way to put your finger on that pulse.

The class of information that looked interesting was “retweets” in other words messages where Twitter users were quoting someone else’s post, essentially saying they liked it, or spreading the word. Tech blogger Robert Scoble called out the same last Friday saying “[Retweets] …by the way, great place to find news!”

The How

So now to the how, obviously Google App Engine was my choice for delivering this application, it’s ease of access, familiar development environment, ease to scale and obvious lack of initial cost make it a winner — Paul McDonald and Tom Stocky being very great folks to talk to, among other Googlers on the App Engine team I am sure, helps as well.

Next I needed the information, Twitter’s great search API acquired with the Summize purchase makes pulling tweets in near real time a non event. Now the value add, the real magic in the idea was to pull relevant information from the tweets and trend them, for that the lesser known Yahoo Term Extraction API was chosen, it’s simple interface, reliability and quality results. So the parts were chosen… we have the ability to capture social media posts, process out key terms, save, count and display them on the web… very nice. So in the equivalent of one days work over the last two days I took these parts and pieces, shook them up with jQuery and released http://retweetradar.com to the world.

The Outcome

The outcome was astounding http://www.retweetradar.com launched publicly via a Tweet and FriendFeed posts at around 8pm CST on Saturday, given the work done on Friday and Saturday certainly no greater than one common work day from start to launch. Once Sunday came around I tweeted the news to a few folks, Dan Zarrella was one he has done work on the data behind viral messaging on Twitter another of note was Robert Scoble to close the loop on his tweet about the value of retweets… then things took and unexpected turn… an inconspicuous but cool “like” came in from Scoble on Friendfeed.

Next thing I know Robert Scoble is using me as an example in a great blog post about events the mainstream media and even Internet media miss…

Robert says:

I love developers who try new things out. Check this out. Is this on TechMeme? No. Plus using Google’s App Engine, which is another trend we’re tracking: cloud computing.

I couldn’t agree more with the topic of that blog, even if I wasn’t involved! You did read it right?

This isn’t about launching another web app…

The fact this is possible is the real star here, the ability for anyone to bring an idea to the web in a highly reliable and scalable way for little to no initial investment shows a bright light toward the future… folks used to say the same for picking up some shared hosting for $5.95 and knocking out some PHP but realistically that app tipped over the second it saw real traffic and was hard to say whether it would be up day by day based on the other people, number of whom soaring each month, who shared your hardware.

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

So, draw your own conclusions to the viability of my new app retweetradar – No, please do! Contact me with feedback on whether it is useful and any ideas to make it better – it’s really not a huge concern long term… but I don’t believe it is possible to argue that these tools be it social media, cloud computing or whatever you want to call them are truly leveling the playing field, flattening the world and company hierarchies and making whatever the future of the web will be possible for anyone.

There is much conversation among bloggers lately about targeting early adopters versus the mainstream, as Scoble would say the passionates versus the non-passionates, should we be excited when the early adopters love our product or service but the masses don’t understand it?

No, we shouldn’t we need to find ways that show the value of what we do to the mainstream otherwise we’ll be here talking to ourselves for years… how can we create that passion, or at least show ours?

The creation of my Google App Engine project ‘spy‘ has created a wave of conversation among my close daily contacts, in my company and even from the Google App Engine team itself, but to me it’s not the JSON feed compositing, the jQuery goodness or even the fun of trying out the App Engine itself… none of that is really that new or complicated it’s about simplicity and visualizing the social media conversation that give meaning to the applications like Twitter and FriendFeed and I believe a larger understanding of social media in general to its ‘viewers’.

Viewers?

Yes ‘viewers’, many need to see the value for themselves before they’d ever jump in and create that first FriendFeed account while we, the early adopters, scurry around and try to sign up for the newest thing in the first hour it’s created (Plurk, Identi.ca, Cuil anyone?).

You see, I talk to (real “normal”) people every day and similar things happen…

Me: “hey, I saw a great post on FriendFeed today, I commented back a tweet to Robert Scoble and he responded back to me in like 5 seconds” or maybe “last night Leo Laporte ‘liked’ my post about spy!”

Them: “huh, cool I guess”

it just doesn’t mean anything to them… I got the opportunity to talk to people I respect and have never met in a here to for unprecedented manner thanks to social media… but to them it is chatter, buzzwords, etc… if I would have got an email maybe that would have meant something to them?

These back channel social conversations just don’t hit home yet for the masses, it is really cool but not impactful to their life… this is where my idea for ‘spy’ was born. How could I make listening into the social media conversation about something you care about as low impact as turning on your TV. How can you show someone meaningful discourse via these new channels that they are overlooking or discounting?

A glimpse of social media from your armchair

So I did something about it, I combined feeds from Summize and Friendfeed to bring together the posts over a given time period and set them to scroll using some packaged JavaScript libraries, this created a simple interface that put in your face exactly what is being said about something that is relevant to you, say a conference you happen to be at, a company you work for, watch a news event unfold in front of your eyes before the US media is reporting it or maybe the news on your favorite presidential candidate.

Tipping Point?

What I saw was once I put something to scroll on a TV in front of someone that they care about people perked up, they laughed, they showed their friends, when a negative or odd post about their company or cause showed up they said “why would people say that online” my answer was two fold…

a) it doesn’t matter why they are saying it, they are… and we need to be listening

and

b) if they are saying it online they are, at least, saying the same thing verbally to all of their friends and it is affecting your company or cause… and we need to be part of the conversation, it is our brand

The next logical question from them was “how do we respond?” Yes! This engagement tipping point I believe is what social media needs, it’s not about newer technologies it needs to be about the conversation its value and its increasing relevance to everything we do.

From our early adopter lens here is no reason that everyone in your company is not participating in the conversation and monitoring their interests, but you need to start from somewhere you need to put the candy infront of the masses and let them decide the value for themselves to me visualization and simplicity are the key to this tipping point.