Laurent Eschenauer

May 16, 2013

21:24

On another note... http://conversat.io/ is simply awesome for multi-user video chat right in the browser. Great showcase of WebRTC. I love what the @andyet team keeps on building.

14:36

The current impact of HN on my site: serving 120 req/s for the last hour, Google Analytics realtime show ~700 active users. Already ~5000 unique. Will post a full recap when done with the storm.

Comments

Well done! I bet that you will get a lot of interesting feedback due to this. Hope you had some caching...

13:51

Me happy :-) My first post making it to the top of hackernews :-) And now I watch my little server being self-ddosed..

13:08

What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

A company that was the cheerleader of the open web is rapidly turning its back on every single open standard they once championned. Their latest move, announced yesterday at Google I/O, appears to be closing XMPP server-to-server federation. It is only a natural next step in a process...

Tags: freedom, google, indieweb

Comments

The question we have to ask ourselves is "Why?". Answers assuming bad intentions are missing the point.

There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network. And also the worst regarding tho spam, ease of use and problems.

My point is not that they *do not* but actually are changing course, and reverting support of things they once championed. That is the scary bit.

i think it's all about GOG vs MSFT:
a) MS do not allow GTalk = Skype
b) but MS wants xmpp to talk from Outlook to GTalk to promote Office 365

Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success.

We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard.

But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.

I'm not saying that it is "good", I'm just saying that it is understandable and very predictable. I remember saying in one of my conference where someone told me that "XMPP was successful at taking over MSN" : "It's not XMPP, it's Google. The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP."

I wish I was wrong…

(preparing a long blogpost on the subject ;-) )

"The good news is, we do not need Google to build the open web for us. "

If that's true, than I don't understand all the whining and crying is all about. Yeah it sucks when a service is closed down but that happens everyday. Why is it such a big deal when Google happens to do it - since *we* don't need them anyway.

@zaidira I think the bitterness comes from the perceived movement in google's culture. A move from their hacker origins to a corporate culture where the masses dominate. Time to move on I guess, but the effort required to replicate google's quality products is a little daunting.

Seriously, they didn't try very hard.

The XMPP community did, bending over backwards to accommodate them. A vast amount of serious effort has gone into reworking S2S authentication, for example, specifically to address Google's requests to make supporting Google Apps domains securely simpler for them.

Jingle was initially designed by Google, but yet they never implemented the latest standards as they were developed - and yet this was their area of greatest interaction.

I've even heard that some of PEP - another set of XMPP extensions they never bothered to implement - was guided by Google so they could deploy it.

Google have been known to use open standards, but they're rubbish at contributing to them.

The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP.

MSN was actually XMPP without federation
Facebook uses XMPP for messaging

That picture looks a lot like Facebook email today

Don't forget http://autonomo.us/

Mike, only a tiny minority care about SMTP, too.

But federation and interop are important, just as Larry Page said, and users will be feeling that loss - and are already.

Google has always said the competition is just a click away. Time to click away, no? I think Google should not set the standards for *my* web activities, anyway. I hope others remain and evolve.

I'm curious if anyone is interested in proof of concept of federated twitter like open source project I've created some time ago: http://dotmesh.org

God, I hate Google. We should stop using them. They're terrible and evil, and are slowly ruining the Internet. Anyway, I'm off to Google News to see what's happening.

Don't forget identi.ca and joindiaspora.com

Google has never cared about the "open web"... it cares about Google being able to access all information out there. It doesn't give a damn-- and never has-- about other people being able to access information.

It's sad that a generation of people have been deluded into thinking google is somehow a force for good. They are blatent patent trolls-- suing Apple (via Motorola) for standards essential patents, which started the whole patent war (Apple sued them in defense)... which is pretty ironic given that android is a ripoff of Apple's IP... all the while Google's publically running an anti-IP campaign (Because as an IP theif they want to get away with it.)

Yet people ignore the fact that Google is the patent troll that started the whole thing and delude themselves into thinking that Google is "right" ... becuase they want to own an android phone without guilt.

At this point, I have no sympathy for people who are so deluded that they think google is anything but evil. They have been evil (and uninnovative) for a long time.

This is not surprising given they make their money by violating people's privacy.

But the deluded fools think "oh this service from google is free, they must be benevolent!"

I look at this as a golden opportunity to re-make the services they are dropping, and then sell them back to them for a nice few million bucks in a year or two. Cheers Larry!

There's not a whole lot of transparency from Goog as to why they make these decisions, so I can only imagine that as they've evolved into a purely commercial company supporting and championing interoperability has become a cost center that runs against some walled-garden vision. Who knows, but I think its sad. If anyone is interested, I'm developing an open-source+hosted API/transport pipelining system, reach out if you want to jump into the code its not released quite yet but happy to open the repo to collaborators... https://bip.io

Hey,
For email I really enjoy using fastmail.fm
Only $30 a year for having your own domain's email, else free.
Hope that's a useful tip for people.

Ian

Thanks for the post! Google is certainly making many strange decisions lately, I think looking elsewhere for the services we get from it is essential before it is too late.

I am working on a system to easily self-host all the services you might need from your own home on a Raspberry Pi. All this with a simple graphical interface, making server management available for the masses. Check it out at https://ark-os.org :)

Yeah, ßingen and Ian, *lots* of alternatives out there. (I have a website and use domain-managed mail. Doesn't cost as much as you might think.) For those of us who wear tinfoil hats and don't care about the laughter behind us, read Brad Thor's "Black List". (Just because yer paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.)

Ploum said: "There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network."

Are you nuts? Lots of our most successful networks have always been decentralized! You can't seriously be suggesting that systems like Usenet, IRC, Bittorrent, XMPP, or the internet itself (!!) aren't successful.

I am working on a Feed reader which works with the open (and open source) API provided by TinyTinyRSS http://jabs.nu/feedthemonkey and on a Twitter-like client for the Open Social Tent Protocol (https://tent.io) http://jabs.nu/bungloo

""Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success. We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard. But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.""

I think the problem is not that Google is abandoning these protocols. (Lots of companies never bothered to use them in the first place, and we're not complaining about those guys.) The problem is they're talking out of both sides of their mouth.

From one side: open is great, Google is open, Google is better than our competitors *because* we're more open. From the other side: we're abandoning a bunch of the most popular open protocols because they're just not working for us (you claim).

I think it would be drastically different if they had said, hypothetically, "CalDav isn't flexible enough for the needs of Google Calendars, so we're proposing a new open standard, SuperCalSync, and inviting everybody to try it out with us". That would show that the existing protocol sucks (well, it kind of does!), but that they think openness can work. But they're not doing that.

I would *love* for Google to put out a press release that said: "We tried open source and open protocols. Nobody cares, and it holds us back. We're going to do everything behind closed doors from now on. Deal with it." Then at least they'd be honest.

Great analysis. this article is good. thanks for posting this article..!

We need personal clouds http://personal-clouds.org/ to restore control to us and give us a say in the features we like to use.

Open is awesome as long as it works in my favor

It's amusing to me that Google's apologists defend the company for almost any action, even when they would be howling if a similar action was taken by Microsoft of Apple. For some reason, there's a portion of the tech crowd that's bought the insane notion that Google has everybody's best interests at heart, so we can trust them. I appreciate and use some of Google's products, but I trust the company less and less — because their actual track record is nowhere near the record of altruism that Larry Page and his supporters would have you believe. (Just to be clear, Google isn't supposed to be altruistic. I'm just sick of the hypocrisy and the dishonesty about it.)

So, when someone defends Google's actions, it may be assumed he also believes Google to have everyone's interests in mind.

I didn't see that assertion in these comments.

Fortunately, I haven't yet seen the "Google is just an advertising company" gem. There's still time, people!

Great idea. They can drop SMTP and go with X.400 instead!!!!

Here, Daniel: "Google is just an advertising company." (Hope I got that in, in time.) The Gorg isn't operating pro-bono. Employees gotta pay the rent and put bread on the table, so to speak. Guess where the bucks come from.

To believe the core of Google's business is anything but advertising simply means one is not paying attention.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

You should see the three year ling thread of comments begging them to add caldav (and carddav) support to android. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7639

This is something that has been in iOS for a long time. This underscored, for me, that Google's business model is not very conducive to open protocols in the long run.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Thats why we should avoid android to and use alternatives like jolla sailfish on our smartphones.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, when you let us speak on your behalf"

Accuracy check: The Chrome RSS extension was taken down by mistake and was subsequently restored weeks ago. The status of RSS support in Chrome hasn't changed.

The W3C Federated Social Web Community Group is missing in the list of "movements":
http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

It is the fifth largest W3C Community Group and currently is concentrating on developing a Best Practices document for the Open Social Web.

Thanks for the summary. Change developpers to developers.

I wish Mozilla adopts XMPP for their FireFox OS chat and messaging. Mozilla are the only real champions of user privacy and the open web.

May 15, 2013

18:21

Nice, @comodit featured on @networkworld !! "Cool tool: One click installation of open source apps" http://t.co/JSVMjky5Gs

16:56

Liked the video - 225 Digits of π: An Irrational Auralization

15:07

Great coverage on @gigaom of our latest news: Want to let users test-drive your apps? ComodIT has a button for you. http://t.co/xHPY7FWRRY

May 14, 2013

15:38

Shared the link Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict

Fascinating piece by the @guardian.co.uk giving a much needed context and perspective to the ongoing Syrian conflict.

"The origins of Syria's 'war by proxy' are therefore unmistakeable - the result of converging climate, oil and debt crises within a politically repressive state, the conflict's future continues to be at the mercy of rival foreign geopolitical interests in dominating the energy corridors of the Middle East and North Africa."

Tags: peakoil

May 13, 2013

22:43

I do not understand the new Daft Punk

In case you haven't seen it, the new Daft Punk is available for streaming on ITunes. I'm just done with my first listening and I'm really disapointed. Based on the Collaborator serie teasers and the vibe of Get Lucky, I was hoping for a groovy, soulfull, funky, disco-house album. Unfortunate...

Tags: music

Comments

These songs would probably be really good to have drugs :-) Like you I think I hated every of their album on first try... second try... third try etc ... :-) But I think I will like this one ! I'll try few times more !
BTW, my fav track is "Beyond".

15:50

Kaskade LIVE from San Diego - It's You It's Me Redux May 3, 2013

09:19

Liked the video - Space Oddity

Chris Hadfield is amazing. First he delighted us with his various science experiments, then he oversees an emergency EVA to fix an ammonia leak on board ISS, and finally he wraps his six month tour aboard the station with a wonderfull cover of Bowie. Some amazing pictures in there as well.

You can follow Commander Chris Hadfield him on twitter.

May 10, 2013

18:18

Nouveau luminaire dans le hall de nuit

Et en plus c'est "made in Liège". Celà vient de chez re-store, en Neuvice.

Tags: luminaire, madeinliege, restore

18:10

Nouveau luminaire dans la cuisine

Perfect for the low ceiling in the kitchen. Made in Liège at the Re-Store.

Tags: luminaire, madeinliege, restore

May 8, 2013

11:50

AVICII - PROMO MIX 2013 - INCLUDING NEW ALBUM TRACKS

May 7, 2013

21:24

Fur Elise - The Jazz version

Ok, this is six years old, but somehow I'm just discovering it now. I love it. It retains much of the original piece spirit while adding an awesome jazz vibe to it. I love jazz and this is a perfect demonstration of what jazz is all about.

Tags: jazz, music

10:38

Smart objects + Google Glass + Virtual interactions = Awesome :-)

Smarter Objects from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

Have a look at this video, and think about a future where you look through Glass instead of your tablet. Everyday objects overlayed by virtual interfaces visible through the digital lense.

Now we just need brain implents to make this even smoother and then we can drop the real world altogether :-)

Thanks to @karinslegers for sharing this.

Comments

Laurent Eschenauer mind=blown. Now itching to try to make some of these things ;)

+1 (#indieweb "Like" button ?)

@waterpigs.co.uk It seems 2013 is the year of the connected objects. With the Pi, the Arduino, and all other geekery stuff coming mainstream we see more and more cool stuff happening with smart objects. Add 3D printing, flying quadcopters, google glass, and it is an amazing revolution happening around us at the moment.

@raphdg Indeed, we need a +1 metaphor in the #indieweb, join us on #freenode to make it happen :-)

May 6, 2013

14:54

Are you #devops? Got the skills to help scaling a fast growing startup? Have a look at this new position at @woorank http://t.co/Yy2HsFiB0w

Tags: devops

May 2, 2013

22:08

If I had known I would need my linear algebra to fly autonomously a #nodecopter, I would have paid more attention to the course :-) Now time for a refresh.

Tags: nodecopter

16:41

Liked the video - Daft Punk - Get Lucky 8 Bit

May 1, 2013

22:49

Shared the link Visual Navigation for Flying Robots

"In this course, we will provide an overview of current techniques for 3D localization, mapping and navigation that are suitable for quadcopters."

Awesome to have such a course available online together with all lectures in mp4 and notes. Perfect for #nodecopter enthusiats.

Tags: nodecopter

Comments

April 30, 2013

21:36

Awesome that @daraosn has compiled WPA supplicant for the #ardrone, so you can connect it to wpa wifi. Thx for this! https://t.co/kRqpyei7zi

Tags: ardrone

11:31

Brussels/Belgium has a lot of catchup to do :-( RT @gmatuschka: Berlin attracted $226m in venture funding last year http://t.co/MqrdaiK6os

April 27, 2013

21:47

Liked the video - Programming flying robots with Node.js

A presentation by Felix Geisendörfer (felixge.de) on programming parrot AR Drone with Node.js. Really exciting stuff, I'm looking forward to play with it.

April 25, 2013

12:59

Shared the link PayPal considering adding Bitcoin as a funding instrument

"And I think here, for us at PayPal, it's just a question of whether Bitcoin will make its way to PayPal's funding instrument or not, and we're kind of thinking about it right now."

Woaw. Imagine being able to use BTC on any site already accepting Paypal, with all the bonus of merchant protection etc... It seems PayPal understands how much bitcoin could disrupt their business and are thinking how to best leverage it instead of fighting it. Brilliant.

Here is the video, the bitcoin comment is at the 2.55 mark.

Tags: bitcoin

12:40

Madeon Triple J Mix

April 24, 2013

21:30

We are on #hackernews front page! Woot :-) "The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread" - Keep on upvoting :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/

Tags: hackernews, Indieweb

14:57

Google Glass, Parrot AR 2.0, Nao robot, Makerbot 3D, Peeble watch... so many cool gadgets to play and hack with ! Exciting times ! But so expensive, and so little time..

10:14

Yeah ! The HTML5 spec just put #bitcoin in the same whitelist as mailto! Isn't that awesome? (/via https://plus.google.com/+marshallk/posts/EkfksZvZhAF)

Tags: bitcoin

09:43

Shared the link The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread

Great summary by Tantek on our #indieweb achievements of the last days. Implementing federation with pingback and microformats is dead easy, when are you joining the conversation ?

Tags: indieweb

April 23, 2013

14:31

I love how @creationix is re-inventing nodejs web development and explaining it at @realtimeconfeu - watch live http://t.co/dZqN3HRxpY

12:53

Reality check for startups... RT @techcrunch What you need to raise $1m. http://t.co/ugv4pQlhJw /cc @betagroup @startupbe @nest_up

09:54

Fédérer les conversations sur le web, comme alternative aux silos que sont Twitter et Facebook, c'est possible! Un exemple ici d'une conversation sur l'#indieweb. Et toi ? Quand vas-tu nous rejoindre ? http://eschnou.com/entry/testing-indieweb-federation-with-waterpigscouk-aaronpareckicom-and--62-24908.html

Tags: indieweb

09:18

Shared the link CameraSim simulates a digital SLR camera

Awesome little webapp that simulates a SLR camera. Great if you want to play and learn tweaking your iso/aperture/shutter.

April 22, 2013

23:18

Having a federated conversation across the #indieweb

The commenters on this post have done so from their own site, in an #indieweb spirit, and notifying my site via pingbacks. This enable a true, federated, two-way conversation in the open web.

No silos, no paywall, no control by a single entity or government. Pure freedom, at least as pure as emailing or calling someone.

I love it :) When are you joining the conversation ?

Featured in this picture are @aaronparecki.com, @tantek.com and @christopheducamp.com

Tags: #indieweb

April 20, 2013

22:50

Daft Punk | Get Lucky (Obenhaus RMX)

I'm amazed that there are already some remixes available on Soundcloud, and some are quite good. I really dig this one.

Tags: Access, Daft, Get, Goiko, Lucky, Memories, Obenhaus, Punk, Random, Remix

April 19, 2013

20:26

Testing #indieweb federation with @waterpigs.co.uk, @aaronparecki.com and @indiewebcamp.com !

Tags: indieweb

Comments

Laurent Eschenauer It worked! Now here's a reply! #indieweb

Laurent, are the REPLIES FROM THE #INDIEWEB displayed automatically, are you manually adding them, or automatically queued and you're just manually approving them?

@tantek.com It is automatic, when I receive a pingback I parse the source for mf2 content to find a hcard and hentry. No moderation, but I receive an email when someone comment/mention so I can react/delete if spammy.

Next for me is to also support webmentions, and enable a 'in-reply-to' flow.

Premier essai pour tenter de rejoindre une fédération #indieweb chez @eschnou #fra

Les réponses #indieweb chez @eschnou

And now we have unified local/indieweb comments, time ordered ! Let's have a real distributed conversation :-)

@aaronparecki.com This is a reply to your reply, making it a really distributed conversation :-)

Laurent Eschenauer great work getting #indieweb comments working :)

@waterpigs.co.uk Thanks for helping out. Could not have done it without your php-mf2 library!

Historically, I consider this to be the #indieweb equivalent of this.

Hey Laurent, how do you know where you have to "attach" the reply, or do you run this task by hand?

@notizblog.org Everything is automatic. The pingback request as a 'target' which I map to an existing post (after a bit of regexp magic). In the 'source' item there should also be a link pointing to the target with a 'in-reply-to' tag. More details here: http://indiewebcamp.com/comment

WordPress and IndieWeb-Comments

Nice! It seems there is a bug in my mf2 implementation and your storytlr is using the title instead of the post.

There is also a few bugs in my side (also in my own comments timestamp as you can see :-). A bit more work needed, but we are getting there :-) Welcome to the conversation!

BTW, is storytlr also sending pingpacks/webmentions in the comments section? If so, do you have a source url for any "comment" or do you support some kind of html fragments like superfeedr does http://blog.superfeedr.com/fragment-subscription/ ?

@notizblog.org Yes, I send pingback for any mention within a comment (hence the @ at the begining of this comment) and the pingback is from a URl + fragment to the comment. I'm missing proper mf for the comment but it is coming.

Le Premier Fil de Discussion Fédéré de Commentaires #Indieweb

Hopefully h-card entities should get expanded in the reply context for this note (crosses fingers)

Testing, testing, is this thing on? 21:46 on 2013-04-26