How the heck does Google manage to stay in business? has some interesting speculation on Google’s business plan for Google Talk. Giving away software for free, building market share, and only then trying to find ways to make money does seem to be a viable business plan for today’s technology companies, but it takes courage, or deep pockets.
I’m on holiday next week, so postings to Untyping will slow down from their usual languid pace.
Google has just released Google Talk, which is an IM client (not very interesting, though it does use the Jabber protocol) and an internet telephony service (much more interesting, though only a Windows client is available).
No doubt I’ll be playing with this technology more in the future, so I thought I’d introduce it now.
OpenLaszlo, released unto the world by Laszlo Systems, is an interesting combination of languages and ideas. It is an XML-based language for specifying the layout and behavior of rich internet applications. For example, I wrote a tabbed slideshow for photographs that you can find on my personal weblog, here….
Blogs are a good way of building reputation, but many of us are too busy to write regularly. As more commercial organisations get into blogging it should come as a surprise to find there is now a company that will out-source your blogging.
Gordon Weakliem references Patrick Logan who references Philippe Bossut who references Alex Russell’s OSCON talk on AJAX. The little tid-bit that gets me excited is the quote "Best data type to return: JavaScript instead of XML". I want to add an emphatic "yes!" to that. Only a crazy fool manipulates XML on the client-side when manipulating Javascript is so much easier. And, yes, I also want add another link to this long chain of attributions.
If you’re a Lisp head, like us at Untyped, when you look at Javascript you get an itch to add back all the parentheses (and fix its silly scoping rules, but that’s another post). Unsurprisingly we’re not the only ones. There is this Lisp to JavaScript Compiler I found via LtU, and also ParenScript. These are pretty cool. Of the two ParenScript is more practical, though the translation remains fairly direct. I’d like to see these languages go further and add features not present in Javascript. I think ParenScript gets the scoping rules correct, so next on my list would be coroutines to make coding animations easier.
I see via Ditchnet.org that IE 7 Beta 1 is out, and support for CSS 2.1 is in the works. For comparison, see what Deer Park Alpha 2 (the next version of Firefox) includes. It looks like IE 7 is going to be a good browser for 2004, and an ok browser for today. This is still good news for web developers, because IE 6 is a terrible browser for today.